“If one speaks about torture, one must take care not to exaggerate.”
Jean Améry (1912–1978) Austrian essayist
At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (1966)
Attributed to Russell in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 450, and in Robertson's Dictionary of Quotations (1998), p. 362, but no specific source is given.
Disputed
“If one speaks about torture, one must take care not to exaggerate.”
Jean Améry (1912–1978) Austrian essayist
At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (1966)
Karl Marlantes (1944) Businessman, novelist
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, Ch. 19 (2010).
Context: He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn't evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.It occurred to Mellas that he could create the possibility of good or evil through caring. He could nullify the indifferent world. But in so doing he opened himself up to the pain of watching it get blown away. His killing that day would not have been evil if the dead soldiers hadn't been loved by mothers, sisters, friends, wives. Mellas understood that in destroying the fabric that linked those people, he had participated in evil, but this evil had hurt him as well. He also understood that his participation in evil, was a result of being human. Being human was the best he could do. Without man there would be no evil. But there was also no good, nothing moral built over the world of fact. Humans were responsible for it all. He laughed at the cosmic joke, but he felt heartsick.
Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night
Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 4
Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil
Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marianne Cowan [Henry Regnery Company, 1955, p. 139]; Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p. 130]
“One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.”
Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer
ibid
Becoming A Barbarian (2016)
Theodore Roszak (1933–2011) American social historian, social critic, writer
Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.11 Only Connect
“God might not care about financial standing, but He was the only one.”
Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States
Source: The Expanse, Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 39 (p. 398)