"A constitutional republic dedicated before everything to the protection of liberty cannot legalize torture and remain a constitutional republic. It imports into itself a tumor of pure tyranny. That tumor, we know from history, always always spreads, as it has spread in the US military these past shameful years. The fact that hefty proportions of US soldiers now support its use as a routine matter reveals how deep the rot has already gone. The fact that now a majority of Republican candidates proudly support such torture has rendered the GOP the party most inimical to liberty in America. When you combine torture's evil with the claims of the hard right that a president can ignore all laws and all treaties in wartime, and that "wartime" is now permanent, you have laid the ground for the abolition of the American experiment in self-government."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Editors from the United StatesCatholics from the United StatesJournalists from EnglandColumnists from EnglandBloggers from England
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
"Torture, Moral Vanity and Freedom", The Daily Dish (17 May 2007)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_Sullivan
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Andrew Sullivan
45 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Andrew Sullivan →
Related Quotes
"Today's age of politicized and intolerant Christianism seems to me to be one of those moments when Christianity has e…"
"First silence. Then denial. Then support of the insupportable. Then vilification of the dissenters. The pattern is as…"
"Torture was necessary to maintain slavery. It was integral to slavery. You cannot have slavery without some torture o…"
"In thinking about the costs of this war, and thinking about renewing it, we have to reconsider what it has done to Am…"
"At home, the public has come to accept torture as a legitimate instrument of government, something that the Founding …"
"There is no state more abject than the man broken on the waterboarding rack, or frozen to near death, or forced to st…"
"It is not an opinion that "enhanced interrogation techniques" are torture. It is a legal fact. And it is also a legal…"
"What al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein did was an extreme form of sadistic torture, the kind that psychopaths enjoy and inf…"
"Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison betw…"
"Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terro…"