The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden.... Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social instituti...ons, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of course, Behaviorism "works." So does torture. Give me a no- nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electr...ical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and tur...n him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know what love is. It's understanding. It's you and me and let the rest of the world go by. Just the two of us living our lives ...together happily and proudly. No self-torture and no doubt. It's enduring and it's everlasting. Nothing can change it. Nothing can change us, Ollie. That's what I think love is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a man of genius is denied of his great love, he goes mad. His brain, instead of being clear to do his work, is tortured, so h...e begins to think of torture. Torture for those who have tortured him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing ... I do not understand it. I feel ...it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me... High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ah! you can die, the world can collapse, I have lost the one I love. I must now live in this terrible solitude where memory is tor...ture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »