A Quote by Eduardo Galeano

The purpose of torture is not getting information. It's spreading fear.

Eduardo Galeano

Quote Topics

Fear Getting Information Purpose Spreading Torture

Quote Author

Eduardo Galeano
Uruguayan - Novelist
September 3, 1940 - April 13, 2015

I don't trust American intelligence. You look at the torture report from the Senate: People inside the CIA are saying that it doesn't work, and we're getting the information not from torture, but simply from questioning people.

Robert Baer

Torture is senseless violence, born in fear... torture costs human lives but does not save them. We would almost be too lucky if these crimes were the work of savages: the truth is that torture makes torturers.

Jean-Paul Sartre

We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.

Hunter S. Thompson

Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them... Torture is how you get bad information, not good intelligence. Torture is how you set back America's standing in the world, not how you strengthen it.

Barack Obama

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.

Janet Fitch

Torture gives you reliable and unreliable information. That's the reason why most people in the world don't do it. So this idea that you have to torture people in order to protect national security is a false argument, and I reject it.

John McCain

Fear breeds upon itself because it is a hermaphrodite capable of endless reproduction. Fear is a contagious disease, spreading from its first victim to others in the vicinity until it is powerful enough to take charge of a group, in which event it becomes panic. Fear is the afterbirth of reason and calculation. It takes time to recuperate from fear.

Ernest K. Gann

People see me doing something so all of the guys from my walk of life feel like if he can do it, I can do it. That just keeps spreading and spreading and spreading.

T.I.

I don't know about torture. I have educated myself on many things but on torture I have not known the boundary between what is torture and what isn't torture. I know the NRA tie these people (rebels, etc.) when they catch them. They tie their hands backwards. I am now being told that is torture. It is the traditional method.

Yoweri Museveni

The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

Masha Gessen

I will use my voice to change the world, spreading hope, spreading love, and spreading life, 'cause the world needs that. That's enough for me.

Victoria Arlen

WikiLeaks exposed corruption, war crimes, torture and cover-ups. It showed that we were lied to about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; that the U.S. military had deliberately hidden information about systematic torture and civilian casualties, which were much higher than reported.

Jemima Khan

The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is 'Do not fear.' It's in there over two hundred times. That means a couple of things, if you think about it. It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn't let fear boss us around. Before I realized we were supposed to fight fear, I thought of fear as a subtle suggestion in our subconscious designed to keep us safe, or more important, keep us from getting humiliated. And I guess it serves that purpose. But fear isn't only a guide to keep us safe; it's also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

Donald Miller

Religion now has degenerated and it has turned into a wolf; it has opened its mouth to show his ugly teeth; its spreading fear instead of love; and science has hidden in a corner like a lamb, trembling with fear!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

Why do people do things that they fear? It may be that the fear contains information. Something can be interesting if you get to the other side of that fear.