{"quotes":[{"text":"Isolation of catastrophic experiences. Dissociation may function to seal off overwhelming trauma into a compartmentalized area of conscious until the person is better able to integrate it into mainstream consciousness. The function of dissociation is particularly common in survivors of combat, political torture, or natural or transportation disasters.","author":"Marlene Steinberg","tags":["amnesia","catastrophe","combat","complex-trauma","concentration-camp-survivor","concentration-camps","consciousness","dissociated","dissociation","dissociative","memory","political-prisoners","psychology","soldiers","survivor","torture","trauma","trauma-survivors"],"id":2764,"author_id":"Marlene+Steinberg"},{"text":"The nostalgia of a moment's love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present.","author":"Mike Norton","tags":["heartbreak","illusion","love","nostalgia","sadness","the-past","time","torture","truth"],"id":3512,"author_id":"Mike+Norton"},{"text":"Sometimes it can be as brutally overwhelming as a tidal wave flooding every orifice, the suffocation, the pressure, the immensity of this damnable depression like an ocean, unsurmountable. It swallows me whole and gnaws at my very bones. It floods me over and over, drowning me over and over... It is a torturous broken record player with a scratched disc on repeat, the wailing disrupting any possible good remaining after the tsunami. It wails and wails inside my ribcage and inside my skull. I cannot make it stop.","author":"Moonshine Noire","tags":["agony","bones","depression","loneliness","mental-disorders","mental-health","metaphors","ocean","records","sea","similes","torture","tsunami","waves"],"id":7256,"author_id":"Moonshine+Noire"},{"text":"Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not whol.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["boyhood","causes","childhood","christian-martyrs","christianity","comrades","conscription","death","fanaticism","friends","kamikaze","martyrdom","martyrs","masochism","memorials","november","orwell","patriotism","poppies","principles","religion","sacrifice","self-abnegation","self-importance","soldiers","suicide","suicide-attack","theocracy","torture","ugliness","war"],"id":11922,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"Sometimes it's torturous to think of things we can't possibly have.","author":"Aaron B. Powell","tags":["apocalypse","powell","torture"],"id":17258,"author_id":"Aaron+B.+Powell"},{"text":"I cannot give up on my values and beliefs for the sake of respecting someone else’s values and morals. Because those values explain who am I. I prefer struggling and even dying for what I believe and what I don’t believe. Silence is not respect; it is not condemning brutality and cruelty, and neglecting your own existence as human being. I will be killed and so many others because of standing against the fallacy and misleading notion of religions. They will torture us and cut us in pieces alive and even won’t stop disrespecting our death bodies; that is how these monsters have been governing for hundreds thousands of years.","author":"M.F. Moonzajer","tags":["beliefs","fallacy","human-being","killing","misleading-notion","morals","respect","respecting","silence","struggling","torture","values"],"id":18759,"author_id":"M.F.+Moonzajer"},{"text":"How could tickling, even though it causes laughter, be at the same time such a vicious form of torture?Sitting on the edge of my bed, I thought it through.I came to the conclusion, at last, that it was like this: Tickling and learning were much the same thing. When you tickle yourself—ecstasy; but when anyone else tickles you—agony.","author":"Alan Bradley","tags":["learning","tickling","torture"],"id":20006,"author_id":"Alan+Bradley"},{"text":"His kindness was only meant to make later torments crueler.","author":"Rosamund Hodge","tags":["kindness","torture"],"id":21636,"author_id":"Rosamund+Hodge"},{"text":"For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs—as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.","author":"Charles Darwin","tags":["ape","apes","belief","evolution","great-ape","great-apes","humanity","humans","man","preference","sacrifice","slavery","superstition","torture"],"id":28694,"author_id":"Charles+Darwin"},{"text":"Anyone even remotely suspect was interrogated, because interrogation is by far the most effective method of speedily banishing inappropriate thoughts from the mind.","author":"Olli Jalonen","tags":["freedom","government","interrogation","politics","torture"],"id":31774,"author_id":"Olli+Jalonen"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":146,"pages":15,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}