Inflict Quotes

1. "Shelves filled with jars of items meant for spells and ridiculous concoctions meant to heal bodies, inflict sickness, remove memories and countless other purposes covered most of the walls. The people brave enough to venture out into this part of the swamp and walk through this door were the ones most desperate for an answer. Most people who knew of the true power of voodoo stayed away. It wasn't an evil humans needed to dabble in. It could possess you, steal your soul if you allowed it."
Author: Abbi Glines

2. "One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies."
Author: Aldous Huxley

3. "Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not. We heal our wounds with the love we wish we'd received, but are often blind to the wounds we inflict."
Author: Andrew Solomon

4. "While I am watching the birds I believe I am comparatively immune from the assaults of life. The very indifference to humanity of these wild creatures affords me a certain safeguard. Where all else is dangerous, hostile and liable to inflict pain, they alone can do me no injury because, probably, they are not even aware of my existence. The birds are at once my refuge and my relaxation."
Author: Anna Kavan

5. "Don't let them win, Marian. Don't let them make you less than you are. Don't let them take away what means the most to you. Not the family who dismissed your strength and your skills, not the bastards who hurt you—yes, I know about them—and not Luthvian. Don't let them win. Fight for what you want with everything that's in you.[...]I was a slave! A half-breed bastard sold to one court after another, wearing that filthy Ring of Obedience to keep me submissive. But I wouldn't submit, I wouldn't break, and I fought back with every breath I took. I refused to be less than a Warlord Prince, and I made them deal with me on my terms. No matter how much pain they inflicted, I gave it back."
Author: Anne Bishop

6. "It would be a great mistake to suppose that it is sufficient not to become personal yourself. For by showing a man quite quietly that he is wrong, and that what he says and thinks is incorrect — a process which occurs in every dialectical victory — you embitter him more than if you used some rude or insulting expression. Why is this? Because, as Hobbes observes, all mental pleasure consists in being able to compare oneself with others to one's own advantage. — Nothing is of greater moment to a man than the gratification of his vanity, and no wound is more painful than that which is inflicted on it. Hence such phrases as "Death before dishonour," and so on."
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

7. "It seemed a ruse that fear of death should be the sole motivation for living and, yet, to quell this fear made the prospect of living itself seem all the more absurd; to extend this further, the notion of living one's life for the purposes of pondering the absurdity of living was an even greater absurdity in and of itself, which thus, by reductio ad absurdum, rendered the fear of death a necessary function of life and any lack thereof, a trifling matter rooted in self-inflicted incoherence."
Author: Ashim Shanker

8. "But this is not to say that the society which inflicts capital punishment commits murder."
Author: Benjamin Tucker

9. "The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed...But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren't. Either way, we're for it."
Author: C.S. Lewis

10. "The most brazen humiliation ever inflicted upon God and mankind, justifying all the curses of the synagogue, is to be found in the 'sive' of the formula Deus sive Natura."
Author: Carl Schmitt

11. "I stomp toward her and point. I've SO had it with her. "That is SO not nice."You don't even talk like a queen." She glares at me.Nick raises an eyebrow at me. "You're a QUEEN?"I walk to the edge of the bed, stand just a few inches away from her. Power rolls off of her. "Okay, please refrain from your insidious comments, which are obviously geared to inflict harm upon my psyche. I do not appreciate it."Nick cracks up. "Well, you ARE the same Zara."
Author: Carrie Jones

12. "She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it."
Author: Curtis Sittenfeld

13. "Trust in someone means that we no longer have to protect ourselves. We believe we will not be hurt or harmed by the other, at least not deliberately. We trust his or her good intentions, though we know we might be hurt by the way circumstances play out between us. We might say that hurt happens; it's a given of life. Harm is inflicted; it's a choice some people make."
Author: David Richo

14. "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."
Author: Elizabeth Goudge

15. "GhostsTake shape under moonlight,materialize in dreams.Shadows. Silhouettesof what is no more. Butghosts don'tbother me. The day bringsbigger things to worry aboutthan flimsy remains ofyesterday. No, spooks don'tscare me.Gauzy apparitions mightprank your psyche oragitate your nightmares,but lackingflesh and bloodthey are powerlessto hurt you-cannot hopeto inflict the kind of damagethat real, livepeople do."
Author: Ellen Hopkins

16. "In short, the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

17. "Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)"
Author: Harold Bloom

18. "I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal."
Author: Haruki Murakami

19. "The various torments of life worked in shifts so that one was always on duty. Thus was human misery extracted day and night like water and oil are pulled from the earth. Thus was the toll inflicted, the price one paid for being unwittingly born."
Author: Hugh Howey

20. "Alexander, I don't know what's going to happen to me either. So what? So we find out together. That's what a relationship is. If it is not working, fix it. If life is hard we learn from each other. You don't run off to keep from inflicting yourself on someone else. If it gets too much for me, I'll say so, but you don't get to decide that for me."
Author: India Drummond

21. "Memory, or rather experience -- which is the memory of the event plus the wound it has inflicted on you, plus the change which it has wrought in you and which has made you different-- experience is the basic nutrition also for a work of literature (but not only for that), the true source of wealth for every writer (but not only for the writer), and yet the minute it gives shape to a work of literature it withers and dies. The writer, after writing, finds that he is the poorest of men."
Author: Italo Calvino

22. "A few days ago I heard a performance of the Sibelius fifth symphony. As the closing bars approached, I experienced exactly the large, swelling emotion that the music was written to elicit. What would it have been like, I wondered, to be a Finn in the audience at the first performance of the symphony in Helsinki nearly a century ago, and feel that swell overtake one? The answer: one would have felt proud, proud that one of us could put together such sounds, proud that out of nothing we human beings can make such stuff. Contrast with that one´s feelings of shame that we, our people, have made Guantanamo. Musical creation on the one hand, a machine for inflicting pain and humiliation on the other: the best and the worst that human beings are capable of."
Author: J.M. Coetzee

23. "I didn't like what that word-'childhood'-conjured up, or rather, I didn't like the way most people use it: that presumption of innocence and starry-eyed wonder. The only good thing about childhood is that no one really remembers it, or rather, that's the only thing about it to like: this forgetting. What else could possibly lie beneath that blissful oblivion but shame: a dark knowledge of that terrible badge of weakness, that inescapable servitude (bearable only thanks to the slow revelation that we could inflict cruelty and evil on the weaker kids), a sickening awareness that just about everything there is to understand was beyond us, made even worse by the lies and inaccuracies that adults feel entitled to spread around, deliberately, or because they don't know any better, about themselves or about the nature of reality?"
Author: Jean Christophe Valtat

24. "Her eyes weren't blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still with the void in which the sum of everything they'd ever said or done, every pain they'd inflicted, every joy they'd shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind."
Author: Jonathan Franzen

25. "At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterous deceptions, he had said not a word of these childish maladies, but had sounded those more incurable, more poignant and more profound: wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt in ruined souls tortured by the present, disgusted with the past, terrified and desperate of the future."
Author: Joris Karl Huysmans

26. "The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments."
Author: Ludwig Von Mises

27. "He bared thick teeth. ‘I am Zacchariah. My price will be right. You show me now?'In that moment, ten generations of horse-traders counted for more than half a lifetime in the legions. I was my father made young again, itching to make a sale. Abandoning the Eagle – I was a horse-trader, what did I care for a gold bird on a stick, however venerated by the Hebrews? – I gathered Pantera and Horgias about me, and trekked back to the inn of the Cedar Tree.Along the way, we collected Zacchariah's well-muscled younger relatives, three other, unrelated, horse merchants who gazed at him with undisguised venom, a woman who claimed she could more accurately assess the sex of the foal our pregnant mare carried, a bone-setter who set to arguing with Horgias but gave up when his poor Greek met Horgias' worse Greek – and Nicodemus and his seven zealots who stood about as we conducted our business, obviously waiting for a chance to inflict violence upon us."
Author: M.C. Scott

28. "In time, the Deity perceived that death was a mistake; a mistake, in that it was insufficient; insufficient, for the reason that while it was an admirable agent for the inflicting of misery upon the survivor, it allowed the dead person himself to escape from all further persecution in the blessed refuge of the grave. This was not satisfactory. A way must be conceived to pursue the dead beyond the tomb.The Deity pondered this matter during four thousand years unsuccessfully, but as soon as he came down to earth and became a Christian his mind cleared and he knew what to do. He invented hell, and proclaimed it."
Author: Mark Twain

29. "If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?"
Author: Michael Connelly

30. "I don't have a set of tenets, but I live an ethical life. I practice a humility that presupposes there's a power greater than myself. And I always believe, don't inflict harm where it's not necessary."
Author: Michael J. Fox

31. "MichaelTobiasEvolution does not condemn us. Only our choices can do that. It is imperative that we cherish, nurture, and endeavor to protect all life forms. That is the wake-up call of this generation. No environmentalist can be true to him/herself if they inflict pain on other creatures. Vegetarian ethics is basic to the last ecological frontier."
Author: Michael Tobias

32. "Let's put achimpanzee in a tiny cage fronted by concrete bars. The animal would go berserk,throw itself against the walls, rip out its hair, inflict cruel bites on itself, and in 73%of cases will actually end up killing itself. Let's now make a breach in one of thewalls, which we will place next to a bottomless precipice. Our friendly samplequadrumane will approach the edge, he'll look down, but remain at the edge forages, return there time and again, but generally he won't teeter over the brink; andin all events his nervous state will be radically assuaged."
Author: Michel Houellebecq

33. "My words aren't only words. They're pictures and tears and imperfect offerings of love and self-inflicted shots to my brain."
Author: Miriam Toews

34. "As a free-speech advocate, I believe that adults should have access to any material they want. As a parent, and a community member, I think people should be able to protect their homes from imagery - much of it violent - that is, I feel, a form of child abuse when adult society inflicts it upon children."
Author: Naomi Wolf

35. "And what of regrets? I shall live with them. I shall accept my regrets as part of my life, to be numbered among my self-inflicted wounds. But I will not endlessly gaze at them. I shall allow the memories to prod me into doing better with those still living. And I shall allow them to sharpen the vision and intensify the hope for that Great Day coming when we can all throw ourselves into each other's arms and say, "I'm sorry."
Author: Nicholas Wolterstorff

36. "The damage that you have inflicted heals over, and the scarred places left behind have unusual surface areas, roughnesses enough to become the nodes around which wisdom weaves its fibrils."
Author: Nicholson Baker

37. "I think you're under no obligation whatsoever to forgive anything, to forget anything. You're not required to push away the years of abuse because the abuser now chooses to be sober and in his sobriety regrets his actions. And white may be small and unforgiving of me, I think people who do so at the snap of a dam finger are either liars or are in need of serious therapy. I assume you heard him out, so in my personal opinion, any debt you might owe for your existence is now paid in full. It may be fashionable to hold that terrible actions are indeed terrible, but that hte person inflicting them isn't responbile due to alcohol, drugs, DNA, or GD PMS. He damn well was responsible, and if you decided to loathe him for the rest of your life, I wouldn't blame you for it. How's that?" (Cybil to Gage - she ROCKS)"
Author: Nora Roberts

38. "You know, I think anybody who has been in relationships has access to heartbreak - I don't think we have to go far to find it, whether we inflicted the heartbreak or whether we were the recipient of it."
Author: Omari Hardwick

39. "Society takes upon itself the right to inflictappalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice ofshallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. When the man's punishmentis over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at thevery moment when its highest duty towards him begins. It is really ashamedof its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun acreditor whose debt they cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflictedan irreparable, an irremediable wrong."
Author: Oscar Wilde

40. "After finishing my breakfast, I puttered around for the next hour and tried not to think about Daniel. I glared at the chair in the middle of the back room as if he were still perched in it, shirtless with that shit-eating grin plastered across his goddamned face. Once, I almost sat in the chair — after carefully locking the door, of course, so no one would accidentally wander in and find me with my nose pressed to the leather, trying to see if it still smelled like him. And then came the self-inflicted chiding and browbeating for even thinking about doing something as ridiculous and lame and downright girlie." ~Evelyn"
Author: Patricia Leever

41. "Are you being a good boy for your mum?" Conor's grandma pinched Conor's cheeks so hard he swore she was going to draw blood."He's been very good, Ma," Conor's mother said, winking at him from behind his grandma, her favorite blue scarf tied around her head. "So there's no need to inflict quite so much pain."
Author: Patrick Ness

42. "The event caused a certain amount of ribaldry and a fair number of sentences depriving men of their grog for playing the God-damned fool, an offense that came under Article Thirty-six 'All other crimes not capital, committed by any person or persons in the fleet, which are not mentioned in this act, or for which no punishment is hereby directed to be inflicted, shall be punished according to the laws and customs in such cases used at sea,' also known as the captain's cloak or cover-all."
Author: Patrick O'Brian

43. "What is there, in the mention of Time To Come, that is so quick to wrench at the heart, to inflict a pain in the senses that is like the run of a sword, I wonder. Perhaps we feel our youngness taken from us without the soothe of sliding years, and the pains of age that come to stand unseen beside us and grow more solid as the minutes pass, are with us solid on the instant, and we sense them, but when we try to assess them, they are back again in their places down in Time To Come, ready to meet us coming."
Author: Richard Llewellyn

44. "[Philip's death was] beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life.... He was truly a fine youth. But why should I repine? It was the will of heaven and he is now out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of vice, full of danger, of least value in proportion as it is best known. I firmly trust also that he has safely reached the haven of eternal repose and felicity. (Alexander Hamilton letter to Benjamin Rush about the death of his 19-year old son from mortal wounds inflicted from a duel.)"
Author: Ron Chernow

45. "I will bear any thing you can inflict upon me with Patience, even to the laying down of my Life, to shew my Obedience to you in other Cases; but I cannot be patient, I cannot be passive, when my Virtue is at Stake!"
Author: Samuel Richardson

46. "It is so irresponsible for people in the ‘I want to change the course of my society' community to not do the damn research into figuring out the latest science of how people change their minds, and under what conditions people change their minds, and what exactly in their minds is being changed.The belief systems people hold are absolutely, in no way, shape, or form the result of any objective evaluation of information. The prejudices are inherited, they're socially inflicted, they're propagandized in school, in church, in communities, in families. They are reinforced by endless bouts of patriotic media and all of this nonsense. People are an emotional Gordian knot kaleidoscopic clusterfrack of prior prejudices stuffed into their heads and held aloft by the spears of social approval and ostracism."
Author: Stefan Molyneux

47. "The sting shot pain all the way to my elbow, causing me to marvel at how much punishment a minuscule creature can inflict. I'm prideful enough to say I didn't complain. After you get stung, you can't get unstung no matter how much you whine about it. I just dived back into the riptide of saving bees."
Author: Sue Monk Kidd

48. "Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed - the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds."
Author: Thomas Keating

49. "I had only four hairs worth shaving, but I managed to inflict five cuts attempting to remove them."
Author: Troy Soos

50. "The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted."
Author: Victor Hugo

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