Best 440 quotes in «cruelty quotes» category

My work is basically an outgrowth of the anger I feel about the human condition. The aspects of it that make me angry are our capacity for cruelty and the ability people have to ignore situations they don't like.

One of the ill effects of cruelty is that it makes the bystanders cruel.

Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody's business to interfere when they see it.

Opinions which justify cruelty are inspired by cruel impulses.

Not all games are innocent. Some come dangerously close to cruelty.

Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.

Savor kindness because cruelty is always possible later.

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.

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

People are able to justify immense cruelty and say that it is something that is sanctioned by their faith.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

The secret of poetry is cruelty.

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

Tis a cruelty to load a fallen man.

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.

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

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

too great pity is the greatest cruelty.

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

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?

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.

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.

War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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!

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

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.

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 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.

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.]