"In the State, as in the Church, in waging war upon treason on the one hand and heresy on the other, torture was admitted to be the most powerful instrument available. It is, although any practical expressions are hidden and camouflaged in a thousand ways, the most powerful instrument available to-day. Because of this basic fact, torture has always been existent in some form or other, and, in the course of the world's history, has made spectacular and sporadic emergencies, which, in themselves, have been partly instrumental in distracting attention from those forms of persecution which have been continually present since the beginning of man's urge to power, and which are existent in our own time....The masses hate anything which they do not understand and at the same time cannot ignore, or which is repugnant to their wishes or tastes. They even hate those who tell the truth, because they do not want to know the truth. The burning of a great national newspaper during the war of 1914-1918, for telling an unpalatable truth, was a gesture as psychologically significant as the burning of the witches in the Middle Ages."
- George Riley Scott, A History of Torture, 1940.
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