"Civilization… How much good and how much evil can it bring?

Wherever it appears, civilisation shows this face of sterile blood and forever dead ruins.

The Torture Garden is a gloomy and sinister satire about the inhuman brutality of humankind. The novel is aesthetically decadent and whimsically fanciful.

Honesty is inactive and sterile; it does not know how to evaluate appetites and ambitions, the only desires in which something durable is found.

It doesn’t pay to be honest and the only way to power in society is unrestricted malevolence…

The future seemed sadder and more desperate than winter twilight falling over the sick patient’s bedroom. And what new infamy would the wretched minister propose after dinner? How much deeper did he want to plunge me into the mire from which one did not return, causing me to vanish forever?

And from this hopeless point of departure the narrator embarked on his dramatic journey through the cosmic atrocity and meanness.

And the smells rising from the crowd – the smells of toilet and abattoir combined, the stench of carrion and the sweat of living flesh – sank my spirits and chilled me to the bone. I often felt the same lethargic torpor at evening in the Annam forests while the miasmas rose up from the deep humus and death lay in wait behind each flower, each leaf and each blade of grass. My breath almost failed me and I felt I was about to faint.

The civilized world is a place of merciless torture skillfully disguised as a wondrous garden."