Definition of Torture

Torture

Extreme pain; anguish of body or mind; pang; agony; torment; as, torture of mind.

Especially, severe pain inflicted judicially, either as punishment for a crime, or for the purpose of extorting a confession from an accused person, as by water or fire, by the boot or thumbkin, or by the rack or wheel.

The act or process of torturing.

To put to torture; to pain extremely; to harass; to vex.

To punish with torture; to put to the rack; as, to torture an accused person.

To wrest from the proper meaning; to distort.

To keep on the stretch, as a bow.

Related Definitions:

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Torture Quotations

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.
Mahatma Gandhi

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.
Barack Obama

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.
Thomas A. Edison

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
Carl Jung

The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.
Henry Miller

War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.
Alfred Adler

Love is a reciprocal torture.
Marcel Proust

The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe.
Bertrand Russell

If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes.
Michelangelo

Obama had the audacity to say, 'I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States.' Ladies and gentlemen, torture in the United States has always been illegal.
Rush Limbaugh

Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than that of laws.
Francis Bacon

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
James Joyce

In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

This stuff on enemy combatants, the Bush Administration has fought like a tiger to avoid having to produce any evidence to a judge to show why somebody is locked up in perpetuity. Another example of that is the torture scandal.
James Bovard

If you wanted to torture me, you'd tie me down and force me to watch our first five videos.
Jon Bon Jovi

The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.
John Calvin

Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.
David Herbert Lawrence

When my father was arrested, we didn't know where they had him. My mother found him at the house of torture. It was called Villa Triste.
Oriana Fallaci

For a woman, forty is torture, the end.
Grace Kelly

In the name of Hypocrites, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
Edward Everett Hale

It's sheer torture. I have to be up with the chickens every day and go to work on my body. I hate it, but I do it.
Eva Gabor

It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing.
John Henry Newman

Chess is mental torture.
Garry Kasparov

When you have to get into the character each morning, give it your voice, your face, it was torture.
Victoria Abril

I would say that the war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay, and greater freedom than the soldier, but at this stage of the game, having the freedom to choose his spot and being allowed to be a coward and not be executed for it is his torture.
Robert Capa

It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.
Henrik Ibsen

Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, 'Well, good on you. See you there.'
Christopher Hitchens

Anyone will say anything under torture.
George Galloway

I suppose what's happened recently has confirmed suspicions I voiced in the book, and I think made clearer some of those things that I point out. For instance I have a section of the book where I talk about the possibility of torture.
Peter Singer

More Torture Quotations

Torture Translations

torture in Dutch is pijnigen, martelen, folteren
torture in Finnish is kiduttaa
torture in French is tourment, torturons, torturent, torturez, supplice
torture in German is Qual, Qual, Folter
torture in Italian is tortura, tormento
torture in Latin is cruciamentum, cruciatus, torqueo, excrucio
torture in Portuguese is tortura
torture in Spanish is tortura, tormento
torture in Swedish is tortera, pina, tortyr

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