Torture

“ There are no caves and holes of torture with muscular bodies writhing within them; but in the despairing figures passing away on the right, some with heads bowed on clasped hands, others lifting up faces and arms in a vain cry for mercy, what suggestions there are of infinite remorse!—more dignified far than the distorted sufferers in the torture pits of previous masters. ”

“ Observing all these muscular displacements in the corpse, all these deviations of the tendons, all these projections of the bones, and on the face, this grin and this dementia of the eyes surviving death, I understood how much more horrible than any other torture must be the agony of a man lying forty−two hours in his bonds under the bell. ”

“ To be bound to unspoken torture, which could end, at the last, only in death—death long deferred, perhaps into hours and days, whose every minute and second would be sharp with anguish—to be so helpless to resist the evils which were sure to come, with the close rope strangling the breath in his throat whenever he attempted to raise his head to see the cruelties which he felt—to add all the mental miseries of suspense to the horrible realities before him—this was enough surely to shake even the sturdy spirit of the defiant pioneer. ”

“ What exquisite and ingenious inventions of cruelty,—what devices discovered by man to torture man! What tales of cruelty, of exquisite and frightful torture, of the breaking of bone after bone, of the wrenching of joint after joint, these cold dark vaults and chambers could tell if they could speak. Imagination shudders to think of what men and women have suffered day after day, month after month, in these dark vaults for the cause of righteousness and of liberty. ”

“ His face was a livid and malignant blot in the thickening dusk. To torture her? What torture could equal his at this moment? She sought merely to move him by an affectation of self-renunciation. That, of course, called at once for extreme punishment. He must bite and strangle her to death. ”

“ And daily, hourly, the hideous instrument of torture claimed its many victims—old men, young women, tiny children, even until the day when it would finally demand the head of a King and of a beautiful young Queen. ”

“ The naked, strong body has known death, and sits in utter dejection, finished, hulked, a weight of shame. And what remains of life is in the face, whose expression is sinister and gruesome, like that of an unrelenting criminal violated by torture. The criminal look of misery and hatred on the fixed, violated face and in the bloodshot eyes is almost impossible. ”

“ I said that to torture was worse than to kill: to make life a curse worse than to take it away. I pointed to the insect that was crawling on the table, and asked if it would not be mercy to kill it, and cruelty, damnable cruelty, to tear off a wing one day, and a limb the next, and so on, till nothing remained of its tortured frame but the quivering pulse of life. ”

“ Do you know what that torture is, which is imposed upon you for long nights by your burning arteries, your bursting heart, your breaking head, your teeth-knawed hands; mad tormentors which turn you incessantly, as upon a red-hot gridiron, to a thought of love, of jealousy, and of despair! ”

“ With steady hand and practised eye he would raise the instrument of torture, nerve himself for a blow, and with fearful force the rawhide descended upon the quivering flesh. It cut the skin, raised great welts, and the warm blood trickled down my back. Oh God! I can feel the torture now—the terrible, excruciating agony of those moments I did not scream ”

“ And the universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture−garden. Blood everywhere and, where there is most life, horrible tormentors who dig your flesh, saw your bones, and retract your skin with sinister, joyful faces. Ah, yes! the Torture Garden! Passions, appetites, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering. ”

“ And the torture—do you put people to the torture?
CROUTEF.—It is our greatest pleasure. We have found it an infallible secret to save a guilty person, who has vigorous muscles, strong and supple hamstrings, nervous arms, and firm loins, and we gayly break on the wheel all those innocent persons to whom nature has given feeble organs. It is thus we conduct ourselves with wonderful wisdom and prudence. As there are half proofs, I mean half truths, it is certain there are persons who are half innocent and half guilty. ”

“ The long scene of torture in which the inhuman wretch kept the innocent object of her remorseless cruelty ere she completed the long premeditated murder, requires no comment, engaging as it did the interest, and exciting the horror of all ranks of people, and rousing the indignation of the populace more than the case of any criminal whose offences it is our duty to record, in the whole course of our melancholy narratives. ”

“ Slowly, at last, came the step of the dead, heavily ascending the stairs;—he entered—I rushed to meet him, and the long pent up agony of my soul burst forth in madness uncontrolled. ‘Monster!—murderer!—destroyer of thy father and thy brother! why comest thou thus to torture and not kill? why is thy bloody hand for ever raised, and yet forbearing to fall? If thine aim be vengeance, strike—strike—strike—thou blood-bespotted horror! ”

“ They kept the sufferer standing, and relieved each other in their cruel work of pinching, pricking, twitching, pulling with ropes, burning, suffocating with offensive fumes, until after successive days and nights of torture the victim was driven to madness, and to promise any thing to escape from his tormentors. ”

“ The incessant torture, the menacing terrors aroused in her by the remembrance of outraged religion and family honour, these dreadful tortures are treated by man as ridiculous whims, as childish scruples, or the absurd influence of the confessional.
If the struggle is prolonged, if the unhappy woman passes her life in efforts to conceal a sorrow caused by her dishonour, and valiantly resists the commission of a second fault, the man is irritated, and revolts against these pruderies which wound his self-love and his eager and brutal passion to the quick ”

“ Is it possible to conceive a more dreadful torture than that endured by a mind which thus witnesses the privation of its organs one after another, and shut up, as it were, in the fullness of life within a corpse? ”

“ Pride.—Ah, not one of you knows the feeling of the tortured man after he has been put to the torture, when he is being carried back to his cell, and his secret with him!—he still holds it in a stubborn and tenacious grip. ”

“ I fell in with a tribe of savages who interested me immensely. The art of torture was brought to a perfection among them that would have made the persecutors of the Inquisition turn green with envy. It was refined torture, such as one would not expect to see save among those who possessed mental powers equal to their cruelty. ”

“ Neither the dismembering knife, nor the red, burning iron, nor the ripping pincers, nor the wedges which spread the joints, crack the articulations, or split the bones like pieces of wood, can work greater ravages on organs of living flesh and fill the brain with more horror than this sound of an invisible and immaterial bell, combining in itself all the known instruments of torture, infuriating all the sensitive and thinking parts of an individual at the same time, and fulfilling the office of more than a hundred executioners. ”

“ The flames that lit the scene of his torture shed their baleful light throughout every corner of our land, and exposed a state of things, actual and potential, among us that should rouse the dullest mind to a sharp sense of our true condition, and of our unchanged and unchangeable relations to the whole race whom the tortured wretch represented. ”

“ For eight long miles this exciting form of torture was experienced, numbers of the poor fellows dropping all along the road from wounds, exhaustion, and from the effects of the now fiercely blazing sun. ”

“ THE IMMORTALS
I killed them, but they would not die.
Yea, all the day and all the night
For them I could not rest nor sleep,
Nor guard from them nor hide in flight!
Then in my agony I turned
And made my hands red in their gore.
In vain—for faster than I slew
They rose more cruel than before.
I killed and killed with slaughter mad;
I killed till all my strength was gone;
And still they rose to torture me,
For Devils only die for fun.
I used to think the Devil hid
In women's smiles and wine's carouse;
I called him Satan, Balzebub;
But now I call him dirty louse. ”

“ For they saw simple, silly women seeking fierce torments in order to make trial of their faith, and going to their death singing psalms, and with no other cry than Christ, the Saviour; young maidens walking more gaily to the place of torture than they would have done to the nuptial couch; men rejoicing when they saw the terrible implements and preparations for death, and although half-burnt and roasted, yet immoveable as rocks when the waves of torture dashed over them. ”

“ The first, or slight torture, which consisted mainly in the apprehensions it caused, comprised the threat of severe torture, introduction into the torture chamber, stripping, and the tying of the rope in readiness for its appliance. To increase the terror these preliminaries excited, a pang of physical pain was added by tightening a cord round the wrists. This often sufficed to extract a confession from women or men of highly strung nerves. ”

“ These men who delighted in the torture of our Lord were sensualists; and there are few of us who if we will watch our selves closely will not find traces of the animal showing itself from time to time. Of this crowd about the Cross relatively few could have known anything about the case of our Lord; but they were fascinated by the spectacle of a man's torture. If the executions of criminals were public to-day there would undoubtedly be huge crowds to gaze upon them. ”

“ I don't speak of such trifles as tears, heartaches, sleepless nights, fevers of jealousy and despair, sacrifices, or discomforts, but of real genuine self-torment and mental torture which only this passion is capable of inflicting on its victims. ”

“ In the old days physical torture wrung a false confession of guilt from hundreds of men and women. To-day it is mental torture that now and again causes an innocent person to plead guilty to crimes that can be purged with imprisonment, but more frequently there is a solid and substantial benefit as the temptation. ”

“ For this Love is enraged with me,
Yet kills not; if I must example be
To future rebels, if th' unborn
Must learn by my being cut up and torn,
Kill, and dissect me, Love; for this
Torture against thine own end is;
Rack'd carcasses make ill anatomies. ”

“ Of agony by torture lengthened out
That lute sent forth! ”

“ Death is death, torture is torture, injury is injury, howsoever gently and politely inflicted. And there is a kind of fitness in having stern-hearted, severe-natured persons to execute such sentences. ”

“ He told himself that it was the enmity of man, and not the vengeance of heaven, that had thus plunged him into the deepest misery. He consigned his unknown persecutors to the most horrible tortures he could imagine, and found them all insufficient, because after torture came death, and after death, if not repose, at least the boon of unconsciousness. ”

“ But, whichever of these reasons it may be, the contradiction is remarkable between the existence of such a custom and the legal authorisation of torture; for what interrogatory can be more suggestive than pain? The former reason applies to the question of torture, because pain will suggest to a strong man obstinate silence, in order that he may exchange the greater penalty for the lesser, whilst it will suggest to a weak man confession, in order that he may escape from present torment, which has more influence over him than pain which is to come. ”

“ In so far as we grow instructed and refined we are not (in any sense whatever) naturally moving away from torture. We may be moving towards torture. We must know what we are doing, if we are to avoid the enormous secret cruelty which has crowned every historic civilisation. ”

“ In other words, the application of torture is only to be resorted to in order that a prisoner whose guilt is quite evident might not be allowed to escape unpunished merely because he obstinately refuses to confess. ”

“ First, there was terror, including the threatenings of the inquisitor, leading to the place of torture, stripping, and binding; the stripping of their clothing, both men and women, with the substitution of a single tight garment, to cover part of the person—being an outrage of every feeling of decency—and the binding, often as distressing as the torture itself. ”

“ The great point that he makes is the unfair incidence of torture, as persons minds and bodies differ in strength. Moreover, it is, says he, to con found all relations to expect that a man should be both accuser and accused, and that pain should be the test of truth, as though truth resided in the muscles and fibres of a wretch under torture. The result of the torture is simply a matter of calculation. Given the force of the muscles and the sensibility of the nerves of an innocent person, it is required to find the degree of pain necessary to make him confess himself guilty of a given crime. ”