Quotes & Sayings About Cruelty

London has always been a haven for victims of cruelty, and been improved by them. Yet I can see it changing now. Outsiders are demonised, there are little bits of legislation, people are scared. — Emma Thompson

What you have to say matters! Post anything about why you chose veganism using the hastag #2Bvegan4 (to be vegan for). — Martin Blais

It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I would put primary emphasis on a good standard of living equitably distributed. It can't be equal, but one that eliminates the terrible cruelty of poverty. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Is it too bold to point out
that there is nothing in the ten commandments
about protecting children against cruelty?
Nothing against rape and nothing against slavery,
and nothing agains genocide.
Could this be because these crimes
are positively recommended
in the rest of the bible? — A.J. Beirens

It is cruelty to be humane to rebels, and humanity is cruelty. — Robert Burns

Exercise power by means of kindness, and you may be causing more damage than you could by cruelty. Neither approach is correct. — Idries Shah

I am sometimes asked, 'Why do you spend so much of your time and money talking about kindness to animals when there is so much cruelty to men?' I answer: 'I am working at the roots.' — George Thorndike Angell

I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves ... — Eve Ensler

It was incredible, she told herself, that this ravening monster, dripping blood from claws and teeth, that had arisen roaring in the night, could be the Humanity that had become her God. She had thought revenge and cruelty and slaughter to be the brood of Christian superstition, dead and buried under the new-born angel of light, and now it seemed that the monsters yet stirred and lived. — Robert Hugh Benson

Well, don't make duck. I'm morally opposed to duck. Do you know what they do to ducks at a duck farm? The cruelty! It's barbaric. But I do love veal. Can you make veal? Or is that too hard for you? — Kristan Higgins

I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her. She will be June plus all that I contain. — Anais Nin

Enduring and forgiving are two different things. You must not forgive the cruelty of this world. It's our duty as human beings to be angry at injustice. But we must also endure it. Because someone must sever this chain of hatred. — Hiromu Arakawa

It is your organized religions that have made it clear through their most sacred scriptures that cruelty and killing is an acceptable response to human frailty and human differences. This goes against every human instinct, but organized religion has reorganized human thoughts. Some humans have even been turned against their own instinct for survival. And so people go around maiming and killing each other, because they've been told quite directly that this is what God does to them
and what God wants them to do to each other. — Neale Donald Walsch

Each year, billions of animals are subjected to cruelty on factory farms, feed lots, and slaughterhouses. The brutality that these animals endure would be grounds for felony cruelty charges if inflicted upon our cats and dogs. — Peter Dinklage

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 them, not the war of all against all. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to conserve them, and show that crime can only return misfortunes and destruction, including of the criminal himself. Who is the last victim of his crimes. — Frederick The Great

Cruelty had been his weapon. But such a tool is dangerous and can spread further than you intend. — Ross Turner

Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden exchange meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty. — Samuel Johnson

Human cruelty took the form of a pact with the deity. A solemn oath was made to kill everything, in which people forbade themselves any display of reason or compassion. A city or a land was devoted to destruction and it was believed an insult to God if one did not observe the abominable oath. — Ernest Renan

The empirical fact is that self-actualizing people, our best experiencers, are also our most compassionate, our great improvers and reformers of society, our most effective fighters against injustice, inequality, slavery, cruelty, exploitation (and also are best fighters for excellence, effectiveness, competence). And it also becomes clearer and clearer that our best 'helpers' are the most fully human persons. What I may call the bodhisattvic path is an integration of self-improvement and social zeal, i.e., the best way to become a better 'helper' is to become a better person. But one necessary aspect of becoming a better person is via helping other people. So one must and can do both simultaneously. — Abraham H. Maslow

Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human. — Storm Jameson

Nothing is more irreligious than to persecute the seekers of truth in order to keep up absurdities and superstitions of bygone ages. Nothing is more inhuman than the commission of 'devout cruelty' under the mask of love of God and man. — Kaiten Nukariya

Ironically, the worship of of death as a strategy for coping with our underlying fear of death's power does not truly give us solace. It is deeply anxiety producing. The more we watch spectacles of death, of random violence and cruelty, the more afraid we become in our daily lives. — Bell Hooks

Ridicule, nominally amusing but really an expression of hostility, was the favourite weapon - the worst possible, short of actual cruelty, in dealing with young people. — Bertrand Russell

World's use is cold, world's love is vain, world's cruelty is bitter bane; but is not the fruit of pain. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Must I go to turn to my Bible to shew a preacher where it is written, that a man's soul is more worth than a world, much more than a hundred pounds a year; much more are many souls worth? or that both we and that we have are God's, and should be employed to the utmost for His service? or that it is inhuman cruelty to let many souls go to hell, for fear my wife and children should live somewhat harder, or live at a lower rate, when according to God's ordinary way of working by means, I might do much to prevent their misery, if I would but a little displease my flesh, which all that are Christ's have crucified with its lusts? — Richard Baxter

Why does shame and self-loathing become cruelty to the innocent ? — Anne Rice

Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed the victim. It has been abetted in its blindness by theories, still in keeping with the pedagogical principles of our great- grandparents, according to which children are viewed as crafty creatures, dominated by wicked drives, who invent stories and attack their innocent parents or desire them sexually. In reality, children tend to blame themselves for their parents' cruelty and to absolve the parents, whom they invariably love, of all responsibility. — Alice Miller

Punishing a person for the wrongs of another makes about as much sense as throwing up to enjoy the meal a second time. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Words can be as deadly as bullets. But bullets are faster acting. ~ Brandon Hull — Jayden Hunter

Tom watched with his arms folded as the life that had been within Kobe died out, and the fire continued. — Keisha Keenleyside

Sometimes it's a revelation, even to me, how much more comfortable I am with cruelty than with kindness. — Amy Engel

And the answer is: You are wrong. The Faeries are not gone. But they are no longer what they were. I watched it and did not help them, though I could have. I cheered. I cheered and I wept and I was glad. Perhaps I should not have been. Perhaps laughing at agony is a Fairy's game and I should not have moved my pieces on their board. — Catherynne M Valente

We have only one heart, and the same wretchedness which leads us to mistreat an animal will not be long in showing itself in our relationships with other people. Every act of cruelty towards any creature is contrary to human dignity. — Pope Francis

I have a high art, I hurt with cruelty those who would damage me. — Archilochus

We are at the crossroads, my little outlaw,
and this is the map of my heart, the landscape
after cruelty — Richard Siken

For too long we have occupied ourselves with responding to the consequences of cruelty and abuse and have neglected the important task of building up an ethical system in which justice for animals is regarded as the norm rather than the exception. Our only hope is to put our focus on the education of the young. — John Hoyt

There is no brutality and cruelty in battles and wars; in reality only the outcome matters. — M.F. Moonzajer

Letter from Philippus of Athens to Lucius Annaeus Seneca: Yet the Empire of Rome that [Octavius] created has endured the harshness of a Tiberius, the monstrous cruelty of a Caligula, and the ineptness of a Claudius. And now our new Emperor is one whom you tutored as a boy, and to whom you remain close in his new authority; let us be thankful for the fact that he will rule in the light of your wisdom and virtue, and let us pray to the gods that, under Nero, Rome will at last fulfill the dream of Octavius Caesar. — John Edward Williams

There was a generation of kids who were just kind of emulating distant heroes and wearing peace symbols, and parents who were thinking of themselves as liberal and removed from barbarity, but it also was the era of Vietnam. I very much was influenced - and I think the whole country was kind of in a state of shock - for the first time seeing the horror and cruelty of war. — Wes Craven

She disinterred the wickedness in normality, cataloguing the ways conformity and repression tip into psychosis, persecution, and paranoia, into cruelty and its masochistic, injury-cherishing twin. Like — Shirley Jackson

She understood at least as well as I did what corruption and pitiless cruelty might be hidden behind the masks that some people wore. - Addison Goodheart pg 93 — Dean Koontz

When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted
anything!
the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women
or anyone
as chattel or inferior beings. — Katha Pollitt

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

In the long run even the most despotic governments with all their brutality and cruelty are no match for ideas. Eventually the ideology that has won the support of the majority will prevail and cut the ground from under the tyrant's feet. Then the oppressed many will rise in rebellion and overthrow their masters. — Ludwig Von Mises

Cast down, O Lord, all the forces of cruelty and wrong. Defeat all selfish and worldly-minded schemes, and prosper all that is conceived among us in the spirit of Christ and carried out to the honour of His blessed name. Amen. — John Baillie

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. — Solomon Northup

When desire meets desire, the stronger one survives. Fulfill your desires! The predator will eat the prey. Our world is a cruel and dirty place ... but that's what makes it so beautiful! Hell is the true paradise! — Naoyuki Ochiai

Oh! if, when we oppress and grind our fellow-creatures, we bestowed but one thought on the dark evidences of human error, which, like dense and heavy clouds, are rising, slowly it is true, but not less surely, to Heaven, to pour their after-vengeance on our heads; if we heard but one instant, in imagination, the deep testimony of the dead men's voices, which no power can stifle, and no pride shut out; where would be the injury and injustice: the suffering, misery, cruelty, and wrong: that each day's life brings with it! — Charles Dickens

Is the capacity for cruelty inherent in all of us? — Soledad O'Brien

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 to forge the foundations, very much like the lava which formed the ground upon which we now stand. Lava still erupts from the core. Brutality, Dominance, and Cruelty similarly erupt from ours; and they are no less prevalent now than in early human history. — Ashim Shanker

Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them. — J.M. Coetzee

I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them. — Philip Pullman

We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases by them. — George Bernard Shaw

I hated her; I wanted her to burn, the way so many of the corrupted had burned, because she'd put her hold on them. But wanting cruelty felt like another wrong answer in an endless chain. — Naomi Novik

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

Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as cruelty. — F Scott Fitzgerald

April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain. — T. S. Eliot

is good enough? In these times the terms good and God are seemingly synonymous. We believe that what is generally accepted as good must be aligned with God's will. Generosity, humility, and justice are good. Selfishness, arrogance, and cruelty are evil. The distinction seems pretty straightforward. But is that all there is to it? If good is so obvious, why does Hebrews 5:14 teach that we must have discernment to recognize it? — John Bevere

It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty. — Ilka Chase

They understood that the innate emotions of humans were mutable. Anger didn't have to lead to violence, hate to cruelty, fear to oppression. There was a space for change between what words were said and what deeds were done. — Ronlyn Domingue

There is cruelty in divorce. There is cruelty in forced or unfortunate marriage. We will continue to cry at weddings because we know how bittersweet, how fragile is the truth. We will always need legal divorce just as an emergency escape hatch is crucial in every submarine. No sense, however, in denying that after every divorce someone will be running like a cat, tin cans tied to its tail: spooked and slowed down. — Anne Roiphe

You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates. — Ariel Dorfman

Neither of them knew what it was to be family, to have family, to make a family. They knew cruelty, abuse, abandonment. She wondered if that was why they had come together. They both understood what it was to have nothing, to know fear and hunger and despair- and both had remade themselves. — J.D. Robb

But all this was beside the point. What scared Amy was the mere fact of what looked inescapably like recreational malevolence. The poem had been written by an adult, not some teen with an unfinished brain. Whoever wrote the line bootlicker, sycophant, toady intended damage, understood how Carla would feel, how anybody would feel, being called such names. The line was playful, offhand, the poem itself a smug, imperious cat stretch. The writer was having fun. Amy had been comfortable in the same room with someone whose idea of fun this was. — Jincy Willett

But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country's inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone. All the kings, except the Chinese, wear military uniforms, and he who kills most people receives the highest rewards. — Leo Tolstoy

The thing that got me about the Orphan Trains was that the experiences were so varied. Some of the kids went from neglect and hunger in New York to loving farm families who couldn't wait to fatten them up, who gave them medical care, an education, affection. And some of the kids became the victims of terrible cruelty, and more hunger, and more neglect - it all depended on who adopted them off of the train. — Laura Moriarty

Emotion is not a defect in an otherwise perfect reasoning machine. Reason, unfettered from human feeling, has led to as many horrors as any crusader's zeal. What use is pity in a world devoted to maximizing efficiency and productivity? Scientific husbandry tells us to weed out the sick, the infirm, the weak. The ruthless efficiency of euthanasia initiatives and ethnic cleansing are but the programmatic application of Nietzsche's point: from any quantifiable cost-benefit analysis, the principles of animal husbandry should apply to the human race. Charles Darwin himself acknowledged that strict obedience to "hard reason" rather than sympathy for fellow humans would represent a sacrifice of "the noblest part of our nature."6 It is the human heart resonating with empathy, not the logical brain attuned to the mathematics of efficiency, that revolts at cruelty and inhumanity. In — Terryl L. Givens

Though you are three times more beautiful than angels,
Though you are the sister of the river willows,
I will kill you with my singing,
Without spilling your blood on the ground.
Not touching you with my hand,
Not giving you one glance, I will stop loving you,
But with your unimaginable groans
I will finally slake my thirst.
From her, who wandered the earth before me,
Crueler than ice, more fiery than flame,
From her, who still exists in the ether
From her you will set me free. — Anna Akhmatova

You see Carter, people are two things: greedy and cruel. So we have a perfect set-up here. The greed part - a kid pays a buck for a chance to win a hundred. Plus fifty boxes of chocolates. The cruel part - watching two guys hitting each other, maybe hurting each other, while they're safe in the bleachers. That's why it works, Carter, because we're all bastards. — Robert Cormier

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. — Shannon L. Alder

The cruelty of fate is that I must travel with the people I hate when the people I love are dead behind me. — Veronica Roth

Everything we get from whales can be obtained without cruelty. Causing suffering to innocent beings without an extremely weighty reason for doing so is wrong, and hence whaling is unethical. — Peter Singer

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid. — Christopher Hitchens

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

True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys. — Yukio Mishima

I want to study human... madness... cruelty... agression... anger... craziness... and other features... I want to find how far can they get! — Deyth Banger

Odd choice of a word, isn't it? Fish is either singular, or plural. Imagine my surprise when I walked in the study and found not one fish in a tiny fish bowl, but an entire aquarium."
She practically vibrated for the need to fight. "Otto was lonely and you were practicing animal cruelty. He was too isolated. Now, he has friends and a place to swim."
"Yes, nice little tunnels and rocks and algae to play hide and seek with his buddies. — Jennifer Probst

The Americans were understandably on hair triggers. There was a good reason for all of this security. For despite TV images of quick victory, much of Baghdad certainly had not fallen and firefights with die-hard Ba'athists loyal to Saddam Hussein were raging all over the city. — Lawrence Anthony

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time. — Leon Trotsky

It was terrifying, almost unbelievable, the casualness of the cruelty. — Lois Lowry

It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too — Sigmund Freud

People routinely assume that pornography is such a difficult and divisive issue because it's about sex. In fact, this culture struggles unsuccessfully with pornography because it is about men's cruelty to women, and the pleasure men sometimes take in that cruelty. And that is much more difficult for people
men and women
to face. — Robert Jensen

Standing before you as the advocate of the lower races, I declare what I believe cannot be gainsaid ... that just so soon and so far as we pour into all our schools the songs, the poems, and literature of mercy toward these lower creatures, just so soon and so far shall we reach the roots not only of cruelty, but of crime. — George Thorndike Angell

Inhumanity is caught from man, From smiling man. — Edward Young

Cruelty to animals is one of the most significant vices of a low and ignoble people. Wherever one notices them, they constitute a sign of ignorance and brutality which cannot be painted over even by all the evidence of wealth and luxury. — Alexander Von Humboldt

Is it not strange,' she said, 'that a little cruelty makes them love me all the more? — Marian Keyes

It is never cruel to want to save yourself from being swamped by fools. — Bryant McGill

If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived "enemies" - his own unconsciousness projected outward. Criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals. — Eckhart Tolle

Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses! — Michael Chabon

Asia discovered two remedies for the cruelty of man, art and religion. America discarded both and is drowning in hate and aggressivity. — Anais Nin

He has known joy and violence. Felt the warmth of children and the cruelty of abuse. He has nearly died saving lives and merely been killed by a drunken act. He has known the finery of grand estates and the filth of stinking slums. He has survived fire and flood, starvation and torment. And nothing could break his spirit-or his great love. This is HIS life. He is called the horse. — Anna Sewell

For the vile human pigs in life; the sloppy, disheveled, uncaring dregs, the ungrateful, and especially for the vicious, negative emotional peasants - there will only continue to be the hard and painful lessons you so desperately need. The invisible hand will hold you in your wretched place until your last breath - unless you evolve. If you are cruel and ignorant the invisible fist will pound you into oblivion until you submit, humble yourself and soften your hard heart. — Bryant McGill

Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated: the field of politics supplies the alchymists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction. — John Quincy Adams

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities. — Harriet Ann Jacobs

Oh no, she was never elitist. She said that far too many women are the accomplices of cruel, indifferent men. They lie for these men. They lie to their own children. Because their fathers treated them exactly the same way. These women always retain some hope that love is hiding behind the cruelty, so that the anguish doesn't drive them mad. Truth is, though, Max, there's no love there. — Nina George

It is evident that a man with a scientific outlook on life cannot let himself be intimidated by texts of Scripture or by the teaching of the Church. He will not be content to say "such-and-such an act is sinful, and that ends the matter." He will inquire whether it does any harm or whether, on the contrary, the belief that it is sinful does harm. And he will find that, especially in what concerns sex, our current morality contains a very great deal of which the origin is purely superstitious. He will find also that this superstition, like that of the Aztecs, involves needless cruelty, and would be swept away if people were actuated by kindly feelings towards their neighbors. But the defenders of traditional morality are seldom people with warm hearts ... One is tempted to think that they value morals as affording a legitimate outlet for their desire to inflict pain; the sinner is fair game, and therefore away with tolerance! — Bertrand Russell

Much more may a judge overweigh himself in cruelty than in clemency. — Philip Sidney

We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength; and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty. — George Orwell

Children know how to be cruel, and the cruelty of their elders is the surest residue of the malaise the young feel toward things strange, things other, things that reveal our own ignorance or insufficiency — Carlos Fuentes