I want to be the most terrible thing that's ever happened to you. Can you understand that? I want to be the only nightmare you ever have.

You give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders."(Larry King Live, May 11, 2009)

A man does not have to feel less than human to realize his sin; oppositely, he has to realize that he gets no special vindication for his sin.

... sleep deprivation is an illegal torture method outlawed by the Geneva Convention and international courts, but most of us do it to ourselves.

Apparently, after 20 minutes of waterboarding, not only will you admit allegiance to Osama bin Laden, you’ll gladly die just to have relief.

Two similar words might lead to two similar ideas. They might also lead to the basement, which I recently converted into a dungeon/torture chamber.

There is nothing worse than fear. Fear is worse than cancer, fear is worse than torture, fear is worse than betrayal and fear is even worse than death.

E pur si muove. (Albeit It does move.)[What Galileo purportedly muttered after torturers forced him to recant his theory that the earth orbits the sun.]

Yeah, he’d yield. He was a bad cut of steak left on the open grill too long, though—the general’s teeth wouldn’t be enough to do the job.

Answers to leading questions under torture naturally tell us nothing about the beliefs of the accused; but they are good evidence for the beliefs of the accusers.

As you can imagine, those who had fallen this far had been so worn down by their tortures in the seven other hells that they no longer had the strength to cry out.

Anyone even remotely suspect was interrogated, because interrogation is by far the most effective method of speedily banishing inappropriate thoughts from the mind.

In cases of distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the first; we return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding torture in our limbs.

Of course he was required to wear a seat belt, just as he was required to give directions to a torture camp, because stupidity was the single abiding law of the universe.

Yeah, all right, but everyone knows they torture people," mumbled Sam."Do they?" said Vimes. "Then why doesn't anyone do anything about it?""'cos they torture people.