If everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture?

"It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness."

Politics," he spat. "Everyone is always looking for material to use against everybody else.

I'm in favor of torture. You know that. And the people are too.

V. — Everybody finds that to abuse in another which he finds worthy of abuse in himself. (1665, No. 33.)

I always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me.

Opponents past and present have the same essential weakness about them: first they want to use you, then they want to be you, then they want to snuff you out.

I am embarrassed that the USA has a Vice President for torture. I think it is just reprehensible. He advocates torture, what else is it? I just don't understand how a man in that position can take such a stance.

A constitutional republic dedicated before everything to the protection of liberty cannot legalize torture and remain a constitutional republic. It imports into itself a tumor of pure tyranny. That tumor, we know from history, always always spreads, as it has spread in the US military these past shameful years. The fact that hefty proportions of US soldiers now support its use as a routine matter reveals how deep the rot has already gone. The fact that now a majority of Republican candidates proudly support such torture has rendered the GOP the party most inimical to liberty in America. When you combine torture's evil with the claims of the hard right that a president can ignore all laws and all treaties in wartime, and that "wartime" is now permanent, you have laid the ground for the abolition of the American experiment in self-government.

Torture injures everyone who comes into contact with it and corrodes the country that abides it.

That's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger — the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up.

it seems like any opportunity the Republicans have to oppress voters, they do that.