Infliction Quotes & Sayings

He had been living in the dark world of his anxieties, and no infliction of reality could seem more terrible than that — Peter Ackroyd

The smallest world on earth is that which is created by a closed mind. — Michael Bassey Johnson

People never gave away their hearts, however willing or desperate or lonely they were. Hearts always had to be taken. By force or trickery. Love was murder, the infliction of death by cardiac theft, and the alternative was even worse. — Scott Nicholson

Furthermore, we can understand those basic freedoms as rights partly because we can understand the reciprocal duty to respect them. My right to life is your duty not to kill me: and duties of non-encroachment and non-infliction are naturally upheld by morality and easily enforced by the law. However, — Roger Scruton

As long as there is unemployment, war, crime and all things that go to the infliction of man's inhumanity to man, regardless - there is much to be done, and people need to work together. — Rosa Parks

I have discovered that I cannot ignore the infliction of suffering - especially for my convenience or pleasure! It's as if a puppy is being kicked in front of me. I must try to do something. — Kristin Bauer Van Straten

Of all the heartache I will ever know, only some of it will be real. The rest, I will create. — Crystal Woods

Oh, I apologize, Padre. I said 'you will see.' I forgot that you can't, in fact, see. So I apologize, but only for the slip of the tongue. Because you and I both know your infliction is something for which the Landlord alone is responsible. — Richard Finney

I would rather quit public life at seventy, and quit it forever, than to retain public life at a sacrifice to my own self-respect. I will not vote for any law which will make fair for me and foul for another. The blacklist is the most cruel form of oppression ever devised by man for the infliction of suffering upon his weaker fellows. — Joseph Gurney Cannon

And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. — Herman Melville

The modern view of criminal justice, broadly, is that public concern with morality or expediency decrees expiation for the violation of a norm; this concern finds expression in the infliction of punishment on the evil doer by agents of the state, the evil doer, however, enjoying the protection of a regular procedure. — Max Weber

In the application of Satyagraha, I discovered, in the earliest stages, that pursuit of Truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one's opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For, what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of Truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but one's own self. — Mahatma Gandhi

Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just. — Simone Weil

It is the heaven-born instinct of a gracious soul to seek shelter from all ills beneath the wings of Jehovah. A hypocrite, when afflicted by God, resents the infliction, and, like a slave, would run from the Master who has scourged him — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

There is an essential difference between the decease of the godly and the death of the ungodly. Death comes to the ungodly man as a penal infliction, but to the righteous as a summons to his Father's palace. To the sinner it is an execution, to the saint an undressing from his sins and infirmities. Death to the wicked is the King of terrors. Death to the saint is the end of terrors, the commencement of glory. — Charles Spurgeon

I told that girl, in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent to deliver judgment upon any one's manuscript, because an individual's verdict was worthless. It might underrate a work of high merit and lose it to the world, or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the way for its infliction upon the world. I said that the great public was the only tribunal competent to sit in judgment upon a literary effort, and therefore it must be best to lay it before that tribunal in the outset, since in the end it must stand or fall by that mighty court's decision any way. — Mark Twain

I am more optimistic though, that this court will eventually conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that is - and the death penalty - must be abandoned altogether. I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will arrive. — Harry A. Blackmun

The cool contemplation of other people's suffering while one exhibits polished manners in a society that is deemed civil is only a shade less immoral than the direct infliction of suffering. Thus, civilization, as it is often practiced today, is really manufactured, inauthentic civilization. — Stjepan G. Mestrovic

In that regard we are different from our ancestors of a few centuries ago, who approved, carried out, and even savored the infliction of unspeakable agony on other living beings. What were these people feeling? And why don't we feel it today? — Steven Pinker

Military necessity does not admit of cruelty - that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, ... nor of torture to extort confessions. — Abraham Lincoln

The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid
what will compare with it? — Herman Melville

It has been the resolution of mankind in all ages of the world. No people, no age, ever threw away the fruits of past wisdom, or the enjoyment of present blessings, for visionary schemes of ideal perfection. It is the knowledge of the past, the actual infliction of the present, that has produced all changes, all innovations, and all improvements - not (as is pretended) the chimerical anticipation of possible advantages, but the intolerable pressure of long-established, notorious, aggravated, and growing abuses. — William Hazlitt

Books, gentlemen, are a species of men, and introduced to them you circulate in the "very best society" that this world can furnish, without the intolerable infliction of "dressing" to go into it. In your shabbiest coat and cosiest slippers you may socially chat even with the fastidious Earl of Chesterfield, and lounging under a tree enjoy the divinest intimacy with my late lord of Verulam. — Herman Melville

The principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment. — William J. Brennan Jr.

Can you hold a red-hot iron rod in your hand merely because some one wants you to do so? Then, will it be right on your part to ask others to do the same thing just to satisfy your desires? If you cannot tolerate infliction of pain on your body or mind by others' words and actions, what right have you to do the same to others through your words and deeds?
Do unto others as you would like to be done by. Injury or violence done by you to any life in any form, animal or human, is as harmful as it would e if caused to your own self. — Mahavira

Every man aims at avoiding what causes him pain; the activities of government ultimately consist in the infliction of pain. All great achievements of mankind were the product of a spontaneous effort on the part of individuals; government substitutes coercion for voluntary action. — Ludwig Von Mises

A 'civilization' that makes such a ridiculous fuss about alleged 'war crimes' - acts of violence against the actual or potential enemies of one's cause - and tolerates slaughterhouses and vivisection laboratories, and circuses and the fur industry (infliction of pain upon creatures that can never be for or against any cause), does not deserve to live. — Savitri Devi

Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, "them" and "us," victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit. — Robert Fisk

[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell. — Bertrand Russell

Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers. — G.K. Chesterton

Soldier and civilian, they died in their tens of thousands because death had been concocted for them, morality hitched like a halter round the warhorse so that we could talk about 'target-rich environments' and 'collateral damage' - that most infantile of attempts to shake off the crime of killing - and report the victory parades, the tearing down of statues and the importance of peace.
Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, 'them' and 'us', victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents a total failure of the human spirit. — Robert Fisk

Becoming a vegetarian is not merely a symbolic gesture. Nor is it an attempt to isolate oneself from the ugly realities of the world, to keep oneself pure and so without responsibility for the cruelty and carnage all around. Becoming a vegetarian is a highly practical and effective step one can take toward ending both the killing of nonhuman animals and the infliction of suffering on them. — Peter Singer

Be guided, only by the healer of the sick, the raiser of the dead, the friend of all who were afflicted and forlorn, the patient Master who shed tears of compassion for our infirmities. We cannot but be right if we put all the rest away, and do everything in remembrance of Him. There is no vengeance and no infliction of suffering in His life, I am sure. There can be no confusion in following Him, and seeking for no other footsteps, I am certain! — Charles Dickens

People who are hard on others are usually very hard on themselves, and the pain they inflict on others is a reflection of the pain they inflict on themselves. — Bryant McGill

Congress's definition of torture in those laws - the infliction of severe mental or physical pain - leaves room for interrogation methods that go beyond polite conversation. — John Yoo

No future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Bush is almost always clear when he's speaking cruelly. For example, when the subject is the punitive infliction of great pain, there is no problem with his syntax, grammar, or vocabulary, even if he happens to be lying ... On the other hand, our president is extraordinarily tongue-tied when he's trying, off the cuff, to sound a note of idealism, magnanimity or
especially
compassion. — Mark Crispin Miller

I loathe, detest, hate and abominate the block, the gibbet, the rack, the pillory and the faggots with equal passion," said the old man vehemently. "Not only are they devilishly cruel but they are not even common sense. They do not lesson the evil in the world, they increase it, by making those who handle these cruelties as wicked as those who suffer them. No, I'm wrong, more wicked, for there is always some expiation made in the endurance of suffering and none at all in the infliction of it. — Elizabeth Goudge

It seems we must be taken twice, by the love that we inflict and then by the infliction of being loved, before we have the humility to look and take whatever agreeable plant that we have never seen before, because of it being all around our feet, and take it and watch it grow, choosing the lesser truth because it's all that we'll ever know. — John McGahern

There can be no law of nature, no science,
No aberrant infliction of human will
That unchained the soul cannot conquer,
Simply sweep away, should it chose to. — Scott Hastie

Even should it be conclusively proved that human beings benefit directly from the suffering of animals, its infliction would nevertheless be unethical and wrong. — Hugh Dowding, 1st Baron Dowding

While his history of depression is compatible with suicide ... and the location and direction of the stab wounds are consistent with self-infliction, several aspects of the circumstances (as they are known at this time) are atypical of suicide and raise the possibility of homicide. — Elliott Smith