Cruelty Quotes

1. "Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact."
Author: Andrea Dworkin

2. "Nevertheless, let no one boast. Just as every man, though he be thegreatest genius, has very definite limitations in some one sphere ofknowledge, and thus attests his common origin with the essentiallyperverse and stupid mass of mankind, so also has every man somethingin his nature which is positively evil. Even the best, nay thenoblest, character will sometimes surprise us by isolated traits ofdepravity; as though it were to acknowledge his kinship with the humanrace, in which villainy--nay, cruelty--is to be found in that degree."
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

3. "That's your cruelty, that's what's mean and selfish about you. If you loved your brother, you'd give him a job he didn't deserve, precisely because he didn't deserve it--that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood. Else what's love for? If a man deserves a job, there's no virtue in giving it to him. Virtue is the giving of the undeserved."
Author: Ayn Rand

4. "[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell."
Author: Bertrand Russell

5. "Joanna. Remember Joanna. Francie could never forget her. From that time on, remembering the stoning women, she hated women. She feared them for their devious ways, she mistrusted their instincts. She began to hate them for this disloyalty and their cruelty toward each other. Of all the stone-throwers, not one had dared to speak a word for the girl for fear that she would be tarred with Joanna's brush...Most women had one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. This should make a bond that held them together; it should make them love and protect each other against the man-world. But it was not so."
Author: Betty Smith

6. "I don't believe vegans (or vegetarians) who still get their (packaged, preservative/chemical-ridden) food from industrial food system have any righteous ground to stand on, nor do I think a deep look at the sentient life of plants or the true environmental impact of agriculture permits them any comfortable distance from cruelty. Everything in this world eats something else to survive, and that something else, whether running on blood or chlorophyll, would always rather continue to live rather than become sustenance for another. No animal wants to be penned up and milked, or caged and harvested, and you've never seen plants growing in regimented lines of their own accord."
Author: Brian Awehali

7. "The crowd laughs at the parody. Weep, ladies, over your own fate, when you see the misery of imprisoned matter, of tortured matter which does not know what it is and why it is, nor where the gesture may lead that has been imposed on it forever.The crowd laughs. Do you understand the terrible sadism, the exhilarating, demiurgical cruelty of that laughter? Yet we should weep, ladies, at our own fate, when we see that misery of violated matter, against which a terrible wrong had been committed."
Author: Bruno Schulz

8. "Dealing with Caleb was all about perspective. You couldn't appreciate his kindness until you'd felt his cruelty."
Author: C.J. Roberts

9. "One day the pigs will breach this door and eat me alive. That's why I stay thin, so when they come, I'll help as few of the fat beasts as possible. If I wasn't eating the ones that I could, they would break through the door and rip me apart even sooner. You might think me cruel, boy, but I only eat them because if I didn't they would eat me…And then who would feed them? Few must be eaten so many can be fed. Kindness is cruel, and cruelty is kind. Pain is inevitable. Some think suffering is optional, but pain is suffering too. Before life pulls the trigger on the gun touching the back of our heads, time has already sent plenty of less fatal bullets through us."
Author: Craig Stone

10. "You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy does not reserve a plot for weeds"
Author: Dag Hammarskjöld

11. "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."
Author: David Chase

12. "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"
Author: Dean Koontz

13. "There is no word in our language which has been so much misused and prostituted as the word love. It has been preached by those who were ready to condone every cruelty if it served their purpose; it has been used as a disguise under which to force people into sacrificing their own happiness, into submitting their whole self to those who profited from this surrender. [...] It has been made so empty that for many people love may mean no more than that two people have lived together for twenty years just without fighting more often than once a week."
Author: Erich Fromm

14. "It's urgent-love.It's urgent- a boat upon the sea.It's urgent to destroy certain words,hate, solitude, and cruelty,some mornings,many swords.It's urgent to invent a joyfulness,multiply kisses and cornfields,discover roses and riversand glistening mornings- it's urgent.Silence and an impure light fall upon our shoulders till they ache.It's urgent- love, it's urgentto endure."
Author: Eugénio De Andrade

15. "Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that 'all the world,' namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait? And could spiritual subtlety imagine any more dangerous bait than this? Anything to equal the enticing, intoxicating, overwhelming, and undermining power of that symbol of the 'holy cross,' that ghastly paradox of a 'God on the cross,' that mystery of an unimaginable ultimate cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man?"
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

16. "Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity."
Author: George Eliot

17. "For over twenty-five centuries we've been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind."
Author: Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

18. "If love goes too far, it turns into cruelty."
Author: Haruo Shirane

19. "Amid the stillness of the night, in the depths of the ravine, from the direction in which the corpses lay suddenly resounded a kind of inhuman, frightful laughter in which quivered despair, and joy, and cruelty, and suffering, and pain, and sobbing, and derision; the heart-rending and spasmodic laughter of the insane or condemned."
Author: Henryk Sienkiewicz

20. "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."
Author: Hiromu Arakawa

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

22. "When Love cast me out, it was Cruelty who took pity upon me"
Author: Jacqueline Carey

23. "I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it."
Author: Jean Rhys

24. "Besides, wouldn't it be wonderful if no one ever had to worry about the random cruelty of fatal illness or the woes of old age attacking them or their loved ones?"
Author: Joan D. Vinge

25. "They believed their words. Everybody shows a respectful deference to certain sounds that he and his fellows can make. But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words. Nobody knows what suffering or sacrifice mean- except, perhaps the victims of the mysterious purpose of these illusions."
Author: Joseph Conrad

26. "The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy."
Author: Ken Kesey

27. "In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, its boundless brutality."
Author: Khaled Hosseini

28. "Calculated, focused destruction – the cold cruelty of an impartial predator – was devastating. A man in his forties, lean and sharp-eyed and jaded, could draw you in with such skill you never noticed that he was planning to cut you down all along. A man like that could play charades and spin lies effortlessly; they could let you go without a backward thought. A man like that was untouchable. Jade had always thought she'd been smarter than to be fooled so thoroughly. But she'd been wrong."
Author: Lauren Gilley

29. "You've probably noticed that after the first half-century practically everybody gets leaky, they can't keep it in ... hence the cruelty of long drawn-out meals and drinking sessions ... ships and apartment houses are the same ... everything starts to leak ... sphincters, bladders, drain pipes, bowels ... the half-century is merciless for ladies and gentlemen ... worse for dogs and cats! ... with them it comes sooner! ... five ... six years ..."
Author: Louis Ferdinand Céline

30. "All cruelty springs from weakness."
Author: Lucius Annaeus Seneca

31. "People shouldn't have to earn kindness. They should have to earn cruelty."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

32. "An author describing the methods of intensive farming, or the excesses of sport hunting, or even the harsher uses of animals in science writes with confidence that most readers will share his sense of concern and indignation. Sounding the call to action--convincing people that change is not only necessary, but actually possible--is more problematic. In protecting animals from cruelty, it is always just one step from the mainstream to the fringe. To condemn the wrong is obvious, to suggest its abolition radical."
Author: Matthew Scully

33. "Love has its place, as does hate. Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge."
Author: Meir Kahane

34. "I believe in preventing cruelty to all living beings in any form."
Author: Morarji Desai

35. "Therefore any cruelty has to be executed at once, so that the less it is tasted, the less it offends; while benefits must be dispensed little by little, so that they will be savored all the more."
Author: Niccolò Machiavelli

36. "[He was disgusted] at the beasts who in callous cruelty had dragged down and maimed and destroyed the human dignity of this selfless man. Yet it was nothing new. It had been like this at some point in every civilization and on every continent. There were human jackals for every human disaster."
Author: Pat Frank

37. "To be a Jew is to belong to an old harmless race that has lived in every country in the world; and that has enriched every country it has lived in."It is to be strong with a strength that has outlived persecutions. It is to be wise against ignorance, honest against piracy, harmless against evil, industrious against idleness, kind against cruelty! It is to belong to a race that has given Europe its religion; its moral law; and much of its science-perhaps even more of its genius-in art, literature and music."This is to be a Jew; and you know now what is required of you! You have no country but the world; and you inherit nothing but wisdom and brotherhood. I do not say there are no bad Jews-userers; cowards; corrupt and unjust persons-but such people are also to be found among Christians. I only say to you this is to be a good Jew. Every Jew has this aim brought before him in his youth. He refuses it at his peril; and at his peril he accepts it."
Author: Phyllis Bottome

38. "The White GoddessAll saints revile her, and all sober menRuled by the God Apollo's golden mean -In scorn of which we sailed to find herIn distant regions likeliest to hold herWhom we desired above all things to know,Sister of the mirage and echo.It was a virtue not to stay,To go our headstrong and heroic waySeeking her out at the volcano's head,Among pack ice, or where the track had fadedBeyond the cavern of the seven sleepers:Whose broad high brow was white as any leper's,Whose eyes were blue, with rowan-berry lips,With hair curled honey-coloured to white hips.The sap of Spring in the young wood a-stirWill celebrate with green the Mother,And every song-bird shout awhile for her;But we are gifted, even in NovemberRawest of seasons, with so huge a senseOf her nakedly worn magnificenceWe forget cruelty and past betrayal,Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall."
Author: Robert Graves

39. "Love is madness," I say. "Doesn't everyone agree that you'd do anything, endure anything, to be with the ones you love? So either you're willing to let them use you with any sort of cruelty, so long as they keep you—which makes you a fool—or you're willing to commit any cruelty, so long as you get to keep them—which makes you a monster. Either way, it's madness."
Author: Rosamund Hodge

40. "You fought and fought to keep all the cruelty locked up in your head, and for what? None of them ever loved you, because none of them ever knew you"
Author: Rosamund Hodge

41. "Who Am I? I'm a creator, a visionary, a poet. I approach the world with the eyes of an artist, the ears of a musician, and the soul of a writer. I see rainbows where others see only rain, and possibilities when others see only problems. I love spring flowers, summer's heat on my body, and the beauty of the dying leaves in the fall. Classical music, art museums, and ballet are sources of inspiration, as well as blues music and dim cafes. I love to write; words flow easily from my fingertips, and my heart beats rapidly with excitement as an idea becomes a reality on the paper in front of me. I smile often, laugh easily, and I weep at pain and cruelty. I'm a learner and a seeker of knowledge, and I try to take my readers along on my journey. I am passionate about what I do. I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer. Come dream with me."
Author: Sharon M. Draper

42. "In my stories, I controlled what happened in a way I couldn't in real life. My characters lived through the horror and degradation of the cruelty of others and they not only survived, they thrived. They gave me hope and laughter, and they kept me going in spite of everything else. They were my heroes."
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

43. "I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives: the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance. . . and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own families."
Author: Stephen King

44. "Here is the paradox of the thing we call freedom: the farther we wander from God and the more we try to break free from him, the more enchained we become. Every step we take away from Him leads us farther from the freedom of Jesus and closer to the cruelty of Cain."
Author: Steven James

45. "…You proved to value love and careOver the riches of your worldDespite your haughtiness, so rare,And cruelty and blood, so cold. …… And you have shownYour love for him deserves to beAnd we return you to your throne,Vampire Queen you used to be. …"
Author: Tatyana K. Varenko

46. "The universe danced towards life. Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time."
Author: Terry Pratchett

47. "Naphta loathed the bourgeois state and its love of security. He found occasion to express this loathing one autumn afternoon when, as they were walking along the main street, it suddenly began to rain and, as if on command, there was an umbrella over every head. That was a symbol of cowardice and vulgar effeminacy, the end product of civilization. An incident like the sinking of the Titanic was atavistic, true, but its effect was most refreshing, it was the handwriting on the wall. Afterward, of course, came the hue and cry for more security in shipping. How pitiful, but such weak-willed humanitarianism squared very nicely with the wolfish cruelty and villainy of slaughter on the economic battlefield known as the bourgeois state. War, war ! He was all for it – the universal lust or war seemed quite honorable in comparison."
Author: Thomas Mann

48. "My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

49. "There is no cruelty greater than a woman's to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation."
Author: W. Somerset Maugham

50. "Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times. so they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without masters; walking altogether like harmony in a song. (2)"
Author: Zora Neale Hurston

Cruelty Quotes Pictures