“The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know.”

— Napoleon I of France

On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspendance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3605, p. 128

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Napoleon I of France 259

French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French 1769–1821

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“Though I cannot claim to be an authority on the subject, I myself have been horrified at the way in which reputable historians have accepted as evidence isolated statements by one peasant extracted under interrogation and torture.”

Arthur Guirdham (1905–1992) British physician, psychiatrist and writer

Source: The Cathars and Reincarnation (1970), p. 108

“The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent — the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of "suspects" — the principal justification for holding them is "interrogation." Interrogation about what? About anything.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Regarding the Torture of Others (2004)
Context: The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent — the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of "suspects" — the principal justification for holding them is "interrogation." Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and torture become inevitable.
Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases, the "ticking time bomb" situation, which is sometimes used as a limiting case that justifies torture of prisoners who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by American military and civilian administrators to learn more of a shadowy empire of evildoers about whom Americans know virtually nothing, in countries about which they are singularly ignorant: in principle, any information at all might be useful. An interrogation that produced no information (whatever information might consist of) would count as a failure.

“As a means of extracting information during interrogations, torture is notoriously unreliable, but as a means of terrorizing and controlling populations, nothing is quite as effective.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)

““I don’t pretend to be anything but a soldier,” growled Galt.
“And it’s precisely that that makes you dangerous in negotiations,” replied William. “Politicians and businessmen always feel more at home with someone who they know doesn’t mean what he says. Honest men always have been a curse laid upon the sharpshooter.”
“A pity,” put in Anea, “that there aren’t enough honest men, then, to curse them all.””

Gordon R. Dickson book Dorsai!

“Protector II” (section 19, p. 488)
Dorsai! (1960)

“To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war.”

Michael Ignatieff (1947) professor at Harvard Kennedy School and former Canadian politician

New York Times magazine op-ed piece, May 2, 2004

“The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“What has gone wrong with
the men who are ruling
I'd like to know who
they think they are fooling
They told us that torture
was over and gone
but everyone knows
the same torture goes on”

Peter Weiss Marat/Sade

Singers, act 1, scene 24 (p. 58)
Marat/Sade (1963)

“If the doctrine of free-will has raised up fanatics and persecutors, who, assuming that men may be good under all conditions if they merely wish to be so, have sought to persuade other men's wills with threats, fines, imprisonments, torture, the spike, the wheel, the axe, the fagot, in order to make them good and save them against their obdurate wills; if the doctrine of Spiritualism, the soul supreme, has done this, the doctrine of Materialistic Determinism has produced shifting, self-excusing, worthless, parasitical characters, who are this now and that at some other time, and anything and nothing upon principle. "My conditions have made me so," they cry, and there is no more to be said; poor mirror-ghosts! how could they help it!”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

The Dominant Idea (1910)

“At midnight they can come into your room and take you away. They can put a black hood on you, take you to a secret place and interrogate you, trying to stop what you’re doing. They threaten people, your family, saying: 'Your children won’t find jobs.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, China’s Censorship Can Never Defeat the Internet, 2012

“I don't give a damn what the President of the United States wants to do or what anybody else wants to do. We will not waterboard; we will not torture… We will not torture people… It doesn't work, my friends. It doesn't work. If you inflict enough pain on somebody long enough, they're going to tell you whatever they think you want to hear to have it stopped… There are accomplished interrogators who can gain the confidence of the suspect and gain all the information that they could possibly want… My God, what does it say about America if we're going to inflict torture on people? It makes it hard for us to make the argument about the moral superiority of our way of our government and our way of life.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

Regarding U.S. president-elect Donald J. Trump's intention to reintroduce the usage of torture by U.S. authorities, as quoted in "John McCain attacks Donald Trump's torture stance" https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/videos/10154266695396939/ (21 November 2016), Channel 4 News
2010s, 2016

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Napoleon I of France 259

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