Best 440 quotes in «cruelty quotes» category

People who need therapy are in Afghanistan. They've seen horrible human cruelty and degradation, but they don't have time or the money for therapy.

Savor kindness because cruelty is always possible later.

Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.

Take that, you scum-sucking snipes. Eat your words and your cruelty. May you drown in it and die. (Nick)

Sometimes it seemed to me a cruelty that so much was unresolved between us; at other times, a blessing that a hope of reunion lingered.

The cancer in me became an awareness of the cancer that is everywhere. The cancer of cruelty, the cancer of carelessness, the cancer of greed.

The death penalty is barbaric. And I think we as a society need to come face-to-face with that. If we're not willing to face up to the cruelty, we ought not to be doing it.

The cruelty of the effeminate is more dreadful than that or the hardy.

The bust of Colonel Sanders stands as a monument to cruelty and has no place in the Kentucky state Capitol.

The civilised cultures are the most cruel. It's the same with education - often it breeds sadistic forms of cruelty.

The human soul finds its saddest imprisonment when it is helpless in the presence of cruelty, when it cannot right a wrong. It finds its highest freedom when it can secure justice to others.

The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.

There is no society for the prevention of cruelty to women.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

There is an accumulative cruelty in a number of men, though none in particular are ill natured.

They're all cruel,' he said. 'The world I come from, the world you come from, and this one, too. Maybe the people don't see the cruelty in your world right away, it's better hidden, but it's there all the same.

The secret of poetry is cruelty.

The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it.

there is only one unpardonable sin--deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven.

The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.

Tis a cruelty to load a fallen man.

Unless we endeavor to do good to our neighbor, through our cruelty we transgress this law

too great pity is the greatest cruelty.

Unlike other vices, cruelty, alas, is never boring.

To exult over the miseries of an unhappy creature is inhuman.

Which is more improbable - that the trillions of solar systems in the known universe exploded from something smaller than a pinhead or that there is an invisible, omniscient moral intelligence present everywhere that has the highest tolerance for cruelty?

War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle.

We are bound to lose Ireland in consequence of years of cruelty, stupidity and misgovernment and I would rather lose her as a friend than as a foe.

What is it the Bible teaches us? -- rapine, cruelty, and murder.

We must be cruel as well as compassionate: let us guard against becoming poorer than nature is!

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

When cruelty is inflicted on innocent people, it discredits whatever cause.

When I look back on it, I think, "Why didn't you stop the cruelty earlier?" To stand back was contrary to my upbringing and nature. When I stood back as a noninterfering experimental scientist, I was, in a sense, as drawn into the power of the situation as any prisoners and guards.

When Love cast me out, it was Cruelty who took pity upon me

When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.

A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other.

Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches and in punishment there is so much that is festive!

Ain't no need of me bullshitting myself or you. I ain't no Gangsta. That don't mean I won't do something gangsta to you for fuckin with me but I don't wake up thinking about my next gangsta move in the morning.

And it seemed as though for a moment, the world encapsulated them in a giant sigh. As if the world was exhausted by humanity—by the bellows of war and bullets, of hateful cries and grieving tears. Of all the pain, the endless pain humanity had brought into its peaceful existence. A great heaving sigh to wash it all away. But like the sea, when washed away, war only crashed harder, a surging line of arched backs and brackish tears.

All classes in proportion to their lack of travel and familiarity with foreign literature are bellicose, prejudiced against foreigners, fond of fighting as a cruel sport -- in short, dog-like in their notions of foreign policy." [Quoted in Socialism and Foreign Policy and War and the Liberal Conscience]

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.]

And for Peter... well, sometimes cruelty is kindness in disguise. Sometimes pain is the best teacher. Sometimes it does you no harm to realize that there's a limit to what you can get away with.

And she was sorry. She knew better. Cruelty never helped the turning of the world.

All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities--even merely with the velvet.

And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again.

An exceptional Sensei has traits such as patience and integrity. Otherwise, natural fighting ability, cruelty and aggressive behavior may be observed in most animal predators.

Boasting about badness without actively involving in badness is mere madness.

Astarte has come again, more powerful than before. She possesses me. She lies in wait for me. December 97 My cruelty has also returned: the cruelty which frightens me. It lies dormant for months, for years, and then all at once awakens, bursts forth and - once the crisis is over - leaves me in mortal terror of myself. Just now in the avenue of the Bois, I whipped my dog till he bled, and for nothing - for not coming immediately when I called! The poor animal was there before me, his spine arched, cowering close to the ground, with his great, almost human, eyes fixed on me... and his lamentable howling! It was as though he were waiting for the butcher! But it was as if a kind of drunkenness had possessed me. The more I struck out the more I wanted to strike; every shudder of that quivering flesh filled me with some incomprehensible ardour. A circle of onlookers formed around me, and I only stopped myself for the sake of my self-respect. Afterwards, I was ashamed. I am always ashamed of myself nowadays. The pulse of life has always filled me with a peculiar rage to destroy. When I think of two beings in love, I experience an agonising sensation; by virtue of some bizarre backlash, there is something which smothers and oppresses me, and I suffocate, to the point of anguish. Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night to the muted hubbub of bumps and voices which suddenly become perceptible in the dormant city - all the cries of sexual excitement and sensuality which are the nocturnal respiration of cities - I feel weak. They rise up around me, submerging me in a sluggish flux of embraces and a tide of spasms. A crushing weight presses down on my chest; a cold sweat breaks out on my brow and my heart is heavy - so heavy that I have to get up, run bare-foot and breathless, to my window, and open both shutters, trying desperately to breathe. What an atrocious sensation it is! It is as if two arms of steel bear down upon my shoulders and a kind of hunger hollows out my stomach, tearing apart my whole being! A hunger to exterminate love. Oh, those nights! The long hours I have spent at my window, bent over the immobile trees of the square and the paving-stones of the deserted street, on watch in the silence of the city, starting at the least noise! The nights I have passed, my heart hammering in anguish, wretchedly and impatiently waiting for my torment to consent to leave me, and for my desire to fold up the heavy wings which beat inside the walls of my being like the wings of some great fluttering bird! Oh, my cruel and interminable nights of impotent rebellion against the rutting of Paris abed: those nights when I would have liked to embrace all the bodies, to suck in all the breaths and sup all the mouths... those nights which would find me, in the morning, prostrate on the carpet, scratching it still with inert and ineffectual fingers... fingers which never know anything but emptiness, whose nails are still taut with the passion of murder twenty-four hours after the crises... nails which I will one day end up plunging into the satined flesh of a neck, and... It is quite clear, you see, that I am possessed by a demon... a demon which doctors would treat with some bromide or with all-healing sal ammoniac! As if medicines could ever be imagined to be effective against such evil!

Animals will be seen on the earth who will always be fighting against each other with the greatest loss and frequent deaths on each side. And there will be no end to their malignity; by their strong limbs we shall see a great portion of the trees of the vast forests laid low throughout the universe; and, when they are filled with food the satisfaction of their desires will be to deal death and grief and labour and wars and fury to every living thing; and from their immoderate pride they will desire to rise towards heaven, but the too great weight of their limbs will keep them down. Nothing will remain on earth, or under the earth or in the waters which will not be persecuted, disturbed and spoiled, and those of one country removed into another. And their bodies will become the sepulture and means of transit of all they have killed. O Earth! why dost thou not open and engulf them in the fissures of thy vast abyss and caverns, and no longer display in the sight of heaven such a cruel and horrible monster?

A wife who obsesses on "fixing" her husband only succeeds in demeaning him. pg 48