World Is Merciless Quotes & Sayings

Milton, when he went blind, declared that he could now begin the real work of his life. Similarly, with the merciless passage of time reducing my phisical strengh, I find myself less able to explore the outer world, but better prepared to explore the inner. — Doug Scott

As always with any discussion of elite immunity, it's crucial to note that what makes this development such a particularly warped travesty is that the very same elites who enjoy this immunity have created the world's largest, and the Western world's most oppressive and merciless, penal state for ordinary citizens. — Glenn Greenwald

I never feel more alone than when I'm traveling. Alone and, to some extent, helpless. The world expects a certain level of competence and can be merciless when this expectation is unmet. — Philip Schultz

"Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it ... have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are raised from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind". — John Wesley

He couldn't change the fact of what he was, nor would he be able to shield Amelia from all the arrows that would be aimed at the wife of a gypsy. But he would be damned if he would let her make her way through a merciless world without him. — Lisa Kleypas

Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped. — James Joyce

An intolerable pain pierced him. He was totally lost without her ... estranged from his life utterly, and from the world. This was the world into which he'd been born; the only world he would ever know. Yet nowhere in it did he feel the slightest degree at home. She was his home ... his one sanctuary upon earth ... the only place of safety for him in the whole universe. But he had lost her ... and consequently was doomed to absolute loneliness in an alien, frozen vacancy ... at the mercy of something huge, insensate and merciless as an eclipse ... For a moment his isolation was so agonisingly intense that it seemed impossible to go on living. He longed only to plunge into the black pit of annihilation opening before him. — Anna Kavan

Man should strive to be a gentleman in a barbaric world, merciful in a merciless time and humane in an inhumane culture. — Seth D.

Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God ; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity , for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him in fact , he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's. — Lionel Trilling

When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky's work will survive. It will point a cool incriminating finger at a merciless Machiavellian empire as cruel, self-righteous and hypocritical as the ones it has replaced. (The only difference is that it is armed with technology that can visit the kind of devastation on the world that history has never known and the human race cannot begin to imagine.) — Arundhati Roy

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth
more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. — Bertrand Russell

Writers haven't got any rockets to blast off. We don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven't got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence? One word of truth outweighs the whole world. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I had never felt like that before, as if there were a sort of curse, a merciless force in the light that shone on a world where life is borken and lost, where each new day takes something from the day that precedes it, where suffering is inmovable ... — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless ... Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own. But here in New York I was ignorant, insignificant, unimportant
one in millions whose destiny concerned no one. New York did not even know of my existence. Nor did it care. — Agnes Smedley

Very few people in the world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other. — Sigmund Freud

The world is merciless, and it's also very beautiful. — Hajime Isayama

America has had to deal with eccentric dictators in the past: Idi Amin, Muammar Qaddafi, Ming the Merciless ... but now the security of the world is threatened by Kim Jong-il, a nerdy, pompadoured, platform shoe-wearer who looks like something you'd put on the end of your child's pencil. — Jon Stewart

O'Brien: How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?
Winston: By making him suffer.
O'Brien: Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. — George Orwell

Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. — George Orwell

Who said childhood was the best time of life? When in reality it was the most terrible, the most merciless era, the barbaric time when there were no police to protect you, only parents preoccupied with themselves and their taller world. — Ray Bradbury

The most important trait of a writer is an authentic voice. Writers have to have faith in their own voice, and their own way of doing things. Originality is the gem that every writer possesses. Originality also brings on the most merciless attacks. The world resents originality in the beginning writer, and then rewards it abundantly once that writer has been successfully published. Cherish your own voice. Don't try to sound like anybody else. Sound like yourself and take the slings and arrows and keep going. — Anne Rice

Not the torturer will scare me, nor the body's final fall, nor the barrels of death's rifles, nor the shadows on the wall, nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain, is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world. — Roger Waters

Mercilessness was not a bad trait to have in the corporate universe. — Soroosh Shahrivar

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory. The invention of hell measured by our Christianity of today, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the deity nor his son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled. — Mark Twain

The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it. — Sergey Nechayev

The most merciless thing in the world is love. When love flees, all that remains is memory to compensate. — Keith Donohue

The detail over which these monks went mad with joy was the universe itself;
the only thing really worthy of enjoyment. The white daylight shone
over all the world, the endless forests stood up in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the sea gathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all these disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy. — G.K. Chesterton

Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomized life as a voracious appetite, and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, planless, endless. — Jack London

Without keeping up a merciless guard, day and night, the variety of forward opinions in this world could easily destroy one's sanity. — J.D. Salinger

Jabotinsky insisted that all energies be expended to force the Congress to join the boycott movement. Nothing less than a 'merciless fight' would be acceptable, cried Jabotinsky. 'The present Congress is duty bound to put the Jewish problem in Germany before the entire world ... (We [Jews] must) destroy, destroy, destroy them, not only with the boycott, but politically, supporting all existing forces against them to isolate Germany from the civilized world ... our enemy [Germany] must be destroyed. — Ze'ev Jabotinsky

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay ... , from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men ... This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other. (p77) — Sigmund Freud

The food that afternoon was served in tins that had contained Russian beef. It was three spoonfuls of boiled macaroni and a piece of bread. That was February 11, 1970. That day saw the beginning of a plan for biological and psychological experimentation more inhuman, brutal, and merciless than anything the western world had known with the exception of the Nazis' activities. — Armando Valladares

Let there always be a preponderance of mercy with you, even though you don't feel such mercy in yourself, as God has for the world ... A cruel and merciless heart is never purified. A merciful man is the doctor of his own soul, because as it were a by a strong wind from is heart he drives out the darkness of the passions. — Isaac Of Nineveh

The world was a merciless place. Hard and cruel. Except when you found someone to trust and love. Life, however fleeting, possessed meaning then. — Sophie Jordan

Summer in Karachi is brutal. The heat alone is ugly and unforgiving. Add unrelenting humidity, and the elements become merciless. The city sits on the sea but is surrounded by desert land that has been known to reach some of the hottest temperatures anywhere. When the heat reaches its peak, you feel baked in an oven and the thick, humid air gives everything an extra, hot skin. It's an effort to even lift your finger. You could get by with air-conditioning, but in this teeming, overpopulated Third World megapolis, it is a luxury few can afford. — Saad Shafqat

Who is the more righteous? The stoic farmer who dutifully tends his fields while the world burns? Or the man who brings merciless violence to the enemies of peace? Is the common criminal an equal villain to the agent who kills on behalf of a cause greater than himself? I've answered these questions and made peace with their consequences. As I mounted my horse alongside Vettias, my mentor in the dark arts, I would need to draw on the fortitude these answers provided more than ever. We — Christian Kachel