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Torture treats individuals as instruments rather than as beings of value, of rational, aesthetic, or spiritual capacities. As Ronald Dworkin has argued, torture is inconsistent with viewing others as full members of the human community. Torture instrumentalizes pain and undermines the victim's capacity for self-government and agency. This, as David Sussman points out, is more than mere cruelty. It forces victims to collude against themselves through their own affects and emotions, to be simultaneously powerless and yet actively complicit in their own violation. During torture, the body betrays the self, and humans are reduced to base flesh, denied of rationality. Unlike killing in war...torture is an attack on the defenseless, who cannot shield themselves, evade, or retaliate, and who cannot know when or whether the attack will ever end. It strips its victims of all human dignity, tyrannizes, and dominates them.

Ron E. Hassner, Anatomy of Torture

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In conclusion, scholars cannot answer the vague question "does torture work?" The evidence available suffices to answer a simpler question: "Does torture sometimes provide actionable intelligence?" The evidence does not yet suffice to answer a more important question: "Does torture provide better intelligence than alternative forms of interrogation?" And the evidence will never suffice to answer the most important question of all: "Does the intelligence extracted by means of torture justify the moral cost of torture?"

Ron E. Hassner, Anatomy of Torture

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Even the Inquisition, in an extraordinary setting in which it was able to perfect a vast torture machinery, was able, at best, to extract nuggets of corroborative information from torture victims. Often, that information was false, misleading, or incomplete. This experience is echoed in contemporary torture accounts. Even the most confident proponents of contemporary interrogational torture concede that torture cannot provide full and decisive information about specific perpetrators or plots [...] This flies in the face of a public perception of torture as a loathsome yet effective "silver bullet" in the fight against global terrorism.

Ron E. Hassner, Anatomy of Torture

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The Inquisition viewed the ability to withstand torture without declaration of guilt as strong proof of innocence. Not once did the court punish with death those who withstood torture in silence...This betrays a deep irrationality on the part of the Inquisition, which seems to have viewed torture as a test of endurance, a trial by fire, a means of purging damning evidence by enduring pain proportionate to its strength.

Ron E. Hassner, Anatomy of Torture

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The Inquisition functioned in an extraordinary environment. Should US interrogators aspire to match the collaboration rate of the Inquisition's torture campaign, they would have to emulate the Inquisition's brutal scope, and vast resources. Our society would have to acquiesce to a massive bureaucratized torture campaign, at times of peace or war, that targeted thousands, from all walks of life, regardless of culpability, in order to extract modest intelligence that was, at best, corroborative. [...] One cannot improvise quick, amateurish, and half-hearted torture sessions, motivated by anger and fear, and hope to extract reliable intelligence. Torture that yields reliable intelligence requires a massive social, political, and financial enterprise founded on deep ideological and political commitments. That is the cost of torture.

Ron E. Hassner, Anatomy of Torture

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[These] are the three conditions under which torture "worked" for the Inquisition: a freedom to torture without political, financial, moral, geographical, or temporal constraints; the patience to employ torture as a last resort; and a distrust in the products of that torture. The key word is worked, past tense. None of these conditions hold in the recent US torture campaign and none are likely to hold in the future. Indeed, insofar as the American public is willing to endorse the use of torture at all, it would not endorse this inquisitorial manner of torture even if it could be implemented. The logic of ticking bomb arguments justifies torturing a single culpable individual, under extreme time constraints, in order to reveal new and crucial information. No inquisitor would have sanctioned such torture. No inquisitor would have expected it to succeed.

Ron E. Hassner, Anatomy of Torture

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We cling to a time and a place because without them man is lost, not only man but life. [...] It is as though all living creatures, and particularly the more intelligent, can survive only by fixing or transforming a bit of time into space or by securing a bit of space with its objects immortalized and made permanent in time.

-Loren Eiseley, The Brown Wasps

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It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.

-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

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Blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one's own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

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It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child - by what means? - a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself.

-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

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I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

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He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness now was mine.

-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

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It came to me...that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize. [...] From this, it would seem, followed the querulous obstinacy with which the anti-Semite clung to his concept; to be deprived of this intellectual tool by missionaries of tolerance would be...the equivalent of Western man's losing the syllogism: a lapse into animal darkness.

-Mary McCarthy, Artists in Uniform

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At once the difficulty, and the hope, of our special time in this world of Western Europe and America is that we have been brought up for many generations in the belief, however tacit, that all humanity was almost unanimously engaged in going forward, naturally to better things and to higher reaches.

-Katherine Anne Porter, The Future is Now

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The silence of the spaces between the stars does not affright me, as it did Pascal, because I am unable to imagine it except poetically; and my awe is not for the silence and space of the endless universe but for the inspired imagination of man, who can think and feel so, and turn a phrase like that to communicate it to us.

-Katherine Anne Porter, The Future is Now

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Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it.

-Robert Frost, The Figure a Poem Makes

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A school boy may be defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic.

-Robert Frost, The Figure a Poem Makes