Quotes about cruelty
Nalini Singh - Archangel's Kiss
Emotion without reason lets people walk all over you reason without emotion is a mask for cruelty.
King Solomon - The Testament of Solomon
Your own soul is nourished when you are kind it is destroyed when you are cruel.
Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity
Good at the wrong place and time becomes evil evil in the right place and time becomes good.
Shannon L. Alder -
A boy has other people do the talking for him a man speaks his mind.
Paul Bamikole -
Do not build a castle around one act of kindness do not build an empire around one act of cruelty.
Thomas Aquinas -
Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution justice without mercy is cruelty.
Shannon L. Alder -
Guilt is a lazy feeling that takes no action the wings of integrity are the only thing that sets it free.
Adhish Mazumder -
Some dark nights hide the cruelest of secrets. Such are the tales of the dark shadows hidden in that old castle in a distant land. The story of ages started with a classic highlighting the infamous monster made out of a man.
M.F. Moonzajer -
There is no brutality and cruelty in battles and wars in reality only the outcome matters.
Sujata Massey - The Sleeping Dictionary
Remember this! It is never an entire people who is cruel it is merely individuals who exert their will on others.
Shannon L. Alder -
It is not the monsters we should be afraid of it is the people that don't recognize the same monsters inside of themself.
Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha
The world was simply too cruel how could I survive?
C.S. Lewis -
And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to do another and harder and better one.
Johnny Rich - The Human Script
Those who perpetrate stories must act cruelly.
Idries Shah - Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
Exercise power by means of kindness, and you may be causing more damage than you could by cruelty. Neither approach is correct.
Shannon L. Alder -
Often a woman that doesn’t have any business being in a fight is there because their ego thinks it can mend what other people can’t. It’s either superiority or a second chance to heal a wound they have, by meddling on your battlefield.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
By the way, a Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow," Ivan went on, seeming not to hear his brother's words, "told me about the crimes committed by Turks and Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria through fear of a general rising of the Slavs. They burn villages, murder, outrage women and children, they nail their prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them so till morning, and in the morning they hang them- all sorts of things you can't imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Our historical pastime is the direct satisfaction of inflicting pain. There are lines in Nekrassov describing how a peasant lashes a horse on the eyes, 'on its meek eyes,' everyone must have seen it. It's peculiarly Russian. He describes how a feeble little nag has foundered under too heavy a load and cannot move. The peasant beats it, beats it savagely, beats it at last not knowing what he is doing in the intoxication of cruelty, thrashes it mercilessly over and over again. 'However weak you ar
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
But I've still better things about children. I've collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, 'most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding.' You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans
Robert G. Ingersoll - Ingersoll the Magnificent
A few years ago the Deists denied the inspiration of the Bible on account of its cruelty. At the same time they worshiped what they were pleased to call the God of Nature. Now we are convinced that Nature is as cruel as the Bible; so that, if the God of Nature did not write the Bible, this God at least has caused earthquakes and pestilence and famine, and this God has allowed millions of his children to destroy one another. So that now we have arrived at the question -- not as to whether the Bib
Michael Bassey Johnson -
We cherish reprobates, not for their cruelty, but for their little show of patronage.
Katherine Addison - The Goblin Emperor
'In our inmost and secret heart, which you ask us to bare to you, we wish to banish them as we were banished, to a cold and lonely house, in the charge of a man who hated us. And we wish them trapped there as we were trapped.' 'You consider that unjust, Serenity?' 'We consider it cruel,' Maia said. 'And we do not think that cruelty is ever just.'
M.F. Moonzajer - HATRED AND MADNESS
Our world needs brutality and cruelty to sustain its equality and justice. Without it, handsome guys and beautiful ladies will fuck everyone they want. And we all ugly people will wait holding our dicks in our hands.
Clarence Darrow -
There are a lot of myths which make the human race cruel and barbarous and unkind. Good and Evil, Sin and Crime, Free Will and the like delusions made to excuse God for damning men and to excuse men for crucifying each other.
Walter Scott -
It was woman that taught me cruelty, and on woman therefore I have exercised it.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch - Venus in Furs
You look at love, and especially woman, as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view.
William Blake -
For Mercy has a human heart;Pity, a human face;And Love, the human form divine:And Peace the human dress.Songs of InnocenceCruelty has a human heartAnd jealousy a human face,Terror the human form divine,And secrecy the human dress.The human dress is forged iron,The human form a fiery forge,The human face a furnace seal'd,The human heart its hungry gorge.Songs of Experience - This poem was discovered posthumously.
Ashim Shanker - Only the Deplorable
It would be both foolish and cumbersome to continue our everyday existences in bliss without first denying to ourselves, for the sake of excusing our own repugnance, the inherent cruelty from which modern civilization was conceived...And there can be no other path by which a fiercely competitive, yet social species, as humanity, can afford its members the level of safety, prosperity and stability—such that we enjoy now— without its initial pangs of cannibalism, brutality, dominance and cruelty t
Michelle Paver -
Men like that — when they know they won’t be found out — they will do anything.
Carl Sagan - Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
...two chimpanzees were observed maltreating a chicken: One would extend some food to the fowl, encouraging it to approach; whereupon the other would thrust at it with a piece of wire it had concealed behind its back. The chicken would retreat but soon allow itself to approach once again--and be beaten once again. Here is a fine combination of behavior sometimes thought to be uniquely human: cooperation, planning a future course of action, deception and cruelty.
Aberjhani - Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black
In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other’s blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven’s love.
Trevor Noah - Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don’t see the person it affects. We don’t see their face. We don’t see them as people.
Frederick the Great - Anti-Machiavel
The cruel man is of misanthropic temperament, and is a man of moods, oscillating from quiet brooding to sudden explosions. If a man like this does not fight this unhappy provision of his soul during his youth, under no circumstances could he a void becoming furious - and foolish. There are those who would leave it up to God, but to ensure justice on the earth, and not fob it off to the Divinity, it is mandatory that people know both virtue and its benefits, since the virtues lead to unity among
Seneca - Anger and Clemency
All cruelty springs from weakness.
Jess C. Scott - Animal Stories
Killing animals to make a fashion statement = a sickening + cold-blooded vanity.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
He was a sceptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel.
Shannon L. Alder -
Lack of communication has a way of clipping our wings, which keeps us from flying. When things are left unspoken, we forget that everyone is destined to share the sky together.
Samuel Crompton -
A man has a very insecure tenure of a property which another can carry away with his eyes. A few months reduced me to the cruel necessity either of destroying my machine, or of giving it to the public. To destroy it, I could not think of; to give up that for which I had laboured so long, was cruel. I had no patent, nor the means of purchasing one. In preference to destroying, I gave it to the public.[On his inability to keep for himself a profitable income from his invention of the Spinning Mule
Richelle E. Goodrich - Making Wishes
Punishing a person for the wrongs of another makes about as much sense as throwing up to enjoy the meal a second time.
Ken Kesey -
The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.
Solomon Northup - Twelve Years a Slave
The influence of the iniquitous system necessarily fosters an unfeeling and cruel spirit, even in the bosoms of those who, among their equals, are regarded as humane and generous.
John Geddes - A Familiar Rain
...here's what I've learned - people will hurt you, but you don't have to respond - not every mean comment or cruel act deserves to be noticed ...
Shannon L. Alder -
Despite our disapproval with what God allows us to endure, he still remains the same God that is not interested in our convenience, as much as our character.
Yōko Ogawa - Revenge
For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they lit
Shannon A. Thompson - November Snow
He's been through so much and to watch that boy suffer makes me wish this world wasn't so cruel.
Arthur Schopenhauer - The Basis of Morality
The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
Shannon L. Alder -
Cruel people offer pity when they no longer feel threatened. However, kind people offer compassion and understanding regardless.
Doreen Orion - and a Bus wit
...It also taught me that while cruelty can be fun for a few moments, compassion has a much longer shelf life.
Shannon L. Alder -
Being kind to someone, only to look kind to others, defeats the purpose of being kind.
Vasily Grossman - Life and Fate
In great hearts the cruelty of life gives birth to good.
William Faulkner - Requiem for a Nun
People. They're really innately, inherently gentle and compassionate and kind. That's what wrings, wrenches...something. Your entrails, maybe. The member of the mob who holds up the whole ceremony for seconds or even minutes while he dislodges a family of bugs or lizards from the log he is about to put on the fire.
Robert G. Ingersoll - Some Mistakes of Moses
Not one word was said by Moses or Aaron as to the wickedness of depriving a human being of his liberty. Not a word was said in favor of liberty. Not the slightest intimation that a human being was justly entitled to the product of his own labor. Not a word about the cruelty of masters who would destroy even the babes of slave mothers. It seems to me wonderful that this God did not tell the king of Egypt that no nation could enslave another, without also enslaving itself; that it was impossible t
Laurence Overmire - The One Idea That Saves the World: A Call to Conscience and a Call to Action
Live with an open mind and an open heart. Always choose love over fear and kindness over cruelty.
Shannon L. Alder -
You can be bit in the leg by a rattlesnake and seek help to heal your wound, or you can run after it and let the poison take your leg. The same is true with love.
Marcel Theroux - Far North
...the years have taught me not to wonder too much at the dark things men do. Strange how it is that men never act crueller than when they're fighting for the sake of an idea. We've been killing since Cain over who stands closer to god. It seems to me that cruelty is just in the way of things. You drive yourself mad if you take it all personal. Those who hurt you don't have the power over you they would like. That's why they do what they do. And I'm not going to give them the power now. But it w
Gayendra Abeywardane - Crocodile Chamber
The cruelty of men had infected the land, and sea only swept in sharp waves to the shores.
Ruth Harrison - Animal Machines
In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people.
Friedrich Nietzsche - On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo
today we read of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, it isalmost an ordeal, which would make us seem very strange and incomprehensibleto the author and his contemporaries, – they read it with a clearconscience as the funniest of books, it made them nearly laugh themselvesto death).To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still – thatOn the Genealogy of Morality4248 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 153–4.49 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 137–9, pp. 140–1, pp.
Ashley Montagu -
The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.
Johnny Rich - The Human Script
Inhumanity is part of humanity as much as suffering is a part of stories. Cruelty is written in the human script.
George Saunders -
Those stories tended to be located around the places where things went wrong, and people were cruel to one another, and so on. They reflected what was probably the most urgent truth operating in me at that time: oh, shit, things can go wrong, and if they do, people get hurt, and I might be one of them, in spite of the fact that I am, you know, me.
Victor Hugo - Les Misérables
In all Thénardier's outpourings, the words and gestures, the fury blazing in his eyes, this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado and abjectness, arrogance, pettiness, rage, absurdity; the hodgepodge of genuine distress, and lying sentiment, the shamelessness of a vicious man rejoicing in viciousness, the bare crudity of an ugly soul -- in this eruption of all suffering and hatred there was something which was hideous as evil itself and still as poignant as truth.
Charles Lamb -
I remember an hypothesis argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, 'Whether supposing that the flavour of a big who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremem) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting an animal to death?' I forget the decision.
Richelle E. Goodrich - Slaying Dragons
So what if you’re right? So what if you’re wrong? In the end you might be surprised to find that God doesn’t care so much about whether you were right or wrong but whether, despite it all, you were kind or cruel.
Jonathan Safran Foer -
What’s the kindest thing you almost did? Is your fear of insomnia stronger than your fear of what awoke you? Are bonsai cruel? Do you love what you love, or just the feeling? Your earliest memories: do you look through your young eyes, or look at your young self? Which feels worse: to know that there are people who do more with less talent, or that there are people with more talent? Do you walk on moving walkways? Should it make any difference that you knew it was wrong �as you were doing it? Wo
Shannon L. Alder -
Fearlessness is not what you do to win, but what you don't do. When you love yourself as much as your God, you won't see other people as the source of your pain. Rather, you will see who you have become because you honestly believed that your chains would be broken through hatred, instead of kindness.
Richard H. Eyster -
We have probably all seen teachers who would pick a student up by the scruff of the neck for saying ‘Shit,’ but who would walk by without a word when overhearing that same student taunting a classmate, calling him a ‘fag.’ It is often easier not to intervene — even when there is a clear-cut victim. It’s out in the hall. It isn’t our business. It isn’t our problem.But our inactions, like our actions, define who we are and what are true values are.
Abby Rosmarin - I'm Just Here for the Free Scrutiny: One Model's Tale of Insanity and Inanity in the Wonderful World of Fashion
The modeling world – and the world at large – is a pretty cruel place. It’s up to you to decide whether or not that turns you into a cruel person as well. Are you going to be mean and selfish because some of the people around you are, or are you going to overcome that and walk away a decent human being? The world gives you every reason in the book to become callous. It’s your job not to become that way as well.
Patrick Rothfuss - The Wise Man's Fear
No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.
Andrew Levkoff - A Mixture of Madness
Since my arrival in Rome, I have had many opportunities to wonder if compassion’s opposite is cruelty, or to reflect whether or not indifference would serve as a better black to its white.
Ursula Vernon - Jackalope Wives
Sweet mother Mary, boy, think about what you’re doing! Be cruel or be kind, but don’t be both, because now you’ve made a mess you can’t clean up in a hurry.
William Shakespeare - Hamlet
I must be cruel only to be kind;Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.
Rosamund Hodge - Cruel Beauty
I coudn't be kind to him after what he'd done, couldn't be cruel after what I had done
Jonathan Safran Foer -
It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.
Lorrie Moore - Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing; It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.
Nadège Richards - 5 Miles
There goes the girl with the wings," they say. "The damned dreamer with her eyes shut to the world.""There goes the misguided soul with her heart buried in the ground."They taunt. They lie. They lie. THEY LIE.I don't pretend to understand life. THEY LIE.
Bangambiki Habyarimana - The Great Pearl of Wisdom
Some people are here on earth because they were sent to hell
Bangambiki Habyarimana - The Great Pearl of Wisdom
The most savage of human kind are the most advanced
Bangambiki Habyarimana - The Great Pearl of Wisdom
Envy: Instead of focusing on your own goals, your goal becomes throwing off the rails other people’s goals and at the end of the day you gain nothing but a mischievous satisfaction that you have destroyed someone’s dream
Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us...
Robert G. Ingersoll -
Is it necessary that Heaven should borrow its light from the glare of
Michael Bassey Johnson -
If blood can produce money through rituals or the so-called human sacrifice, then it is the basis on which we live, so it is very essential to save and protect it from the fiendish eyes of blood sucking predators.
Silje Akselberg Iversen -
True monsters are not those lurking under the bed, but the ones sleeping in it.
Shannon L. Alder -
You can't fight mental health bias if you label people based on a lists of symptoms and you have no medical degree to diagnose people. We all have crazy running through our blood and so many things trigger that. We all struggle with our anxiety and twisted issues. Defamation of character is not kind, nor Christlike. Because when you label people with self righteous vindication you open the door to the very idea that self righteousness is itself a disorder that we should all be afraid of. This do
Jincy Willett - The Writing Class
Actually, the Sniper's sense of humor frightened Amy more than anything else. The parody of Carla's poem had been witty, the rudeness of Marvy's critique outlandish, and she was still, for some reason, focused on that "youse" in the Sniper's counterfeit email. "Youse" was like a spectral elbow to Amy's ribs. Dangerous, malevolent people should not be amusing. In order to be humorous, you had to have perspective, to be able to stand outside yourself and your own needs and grudges and fears and se
Katherine Catmull - Summer and Bird
She wasn't a cruel Bird. But her heart ached so badly for these sad, broken birds that, just as the Puppeteer had planned, she had begun to hate them. She hated them for making her feel so wretched, when she should be happiest. That happens sometimes.
Keisha Keenleyside - Memoirs of a Fighting Dog
Tom watched with his arms folded as the life that had been within Kobe died out, and the fire continued.
Nenia Campbell - Endgame
That's not cruel. This is. You come here in the middle of the night, expecting me to be awake, and ask—no, demand—me to give you things that belong to me as much as they belong to you. Never mind what it does to me. Never mind that each time I see you, I wonder if I'll ever hold you in my arms again, or be able to touch you without you cringing away like I'm a monster. I think it's fair to ask if there's an 'us,' my dear, because I suspect you're trying to use me just now. Tell me that's not cru
Michael Bassey Johnson -
Many writers make the mistake of making their readers appear like Lazarus, without any iota of care, throwing down books to readers to crunch as if they are dogs.
Friedrich Nietzsche -
Man is the cruelest animal.
Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
Shannon L. Alder -
The daggers of silence last longer than anything ever spoken.
Haruki Murakami - West of the Sun
I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a w
Malcolm Bradbury - Eating People is Wrong
But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
Maybe it’s a whole lot less about focusing on the fact that we’re all victims and a whole lot more about the changing the fact that we’re all careless, as that is what victimized all of us in the first place.
Alexei Maxim Russell - Alexei Maxim Russell's Field Guide to Assholes
It is my sincere desire that my research and hard work will help create a world where we all learn to walk this Earth, safe, enlightened and free from the perils of cruelty, ignorance, and all the other dark and sinister forces, which make assholes possible.
Robert G. Ingersoll - Woman and Child
The history of man is simply the history of slavery, of injustice and brutality, together with the means by which he has, through the dead and desolate years, slowly and painfully advanced. He has been the sport and prey of priest and king, the food of superstition and cruel might. Crowned force has governed ignorance through fear. Hypocrisy and tyranny—two vultures—have fed upon the liberties of man. From all these there has been, and is, but one means of escape—intellectual development. Upon t
Tennessee Williams -
All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
Veronica Roth -
It's not cruelty, maybe, but a desire to understand that motivates them.