Ruthless Quotes

1. "To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language."
Author: Aleister Crowley

2. ". The thorns, ruthless in their protection of the beauty they upheld, tore at my skin, bleeding me like a vampire's victim and no doubt loving every moment of it. The vines snaked around my hands and arms trying to cut the circulation of blood."
Author: Alistair Cross

3. "An ordinary man gets arrogant with beauty, conceited with knowledge and ruthless with power."
Author: Amit Kalantri

4. "Calvin: Look, a dead bird! Hobbes: It must've hit a window. Calvin: Isn't it beautiful? It's so delicate. Sighhh... once it's too late, you appreciate what a miracle life is. You realize that nature is ruthless and our existence is very fragile, temporary, and precious. But to go on with your daily affairs, you can't really think about that...which is probably why everyone takes the world for granted and why we act so thoughtlessly. It's very confusing. I suppose it will all make sense when we grow up. Hobbes: No doubt."
Author: Bill Watterson

5. "With domineering hand she moves the turning wheel,Like currents in a treacherous bay swept to and fro:Her ruthless will has just deposed once fearful kingsWhile trustless still, from low she lifts a conquered head;No cries of misery she hears, no tears she heeds,But steely hearted laughs at groans her deeds have wrung.Such is a game she plays, and so she tests her strength;Of mighty power she makes parade when one short hourSees happiness from utter desolation grow.(A Consolation of Philosophy, Book II, translated by V.E. Watts)"
Author: Boethius Queen Elizabeth I Translation

6. "In this world are very few things made from logic alone. It is illogical for man to be too logical. Some things we must just let stand. The mystery is more important than any possible explanation. The searcher after truth must search with humanity. Ruthless logic is the sign of a limited mind. The truth can only add to the sum of what you know, while a harmless mystery left unexplored often adds to the meaning of life. When a truth is not so important, it is better left as a mystery."
Author: Bryce Courtenay

7. "Naturally, society has an indisputable right to protect itself against arrant subjectivisms, but, in so far as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes – it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hand of a single madman."
Author: C.G. Jung

8. "Make him love you," Ruthless Me whispered. "Make it so he can't live without you. The devil you know." I felt her growing inside me, bringing with her the insane idea that I actually wielded power with Caleb."
Author: C.J. Roberts

9. "Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running smoothly."
Author: Carl Sagan

10. "This is a ruthless world and one must be ruthless to cope with it."
Author: Charlie Chaplin

11. "God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch."
Author: Cheryl Strayed

12. "The past is but an untraceable footfallIt appears in intervals and pushes us back in time,In those moments of grief and then suddenly vanishes.It's often dark and ruthless.It baffles our thoughts and seizes our peace of mind.By making us recollect our failures, our buried expectationsAnd our shattered dreams It only gives way to fleeting tears, leaving us with fruitless guilt.It wrecks our present and ruins our futureAnd thus should be left where it is meant to beIt should be left behind …"
Author: Chirag Tulsiani

13. "War," Beranabus murmurs, face crinkling. "Most humans know nothing of true warfare. They wage their silly territorial battles, kill each other ruthlessly and freely, and consider themselves experts on war and suffering. But the real war has always been ahead of them, unseen, unimagined. Enemies who can't be killed by normal weapons, who have their base in an alternate universe, who are interested only in slaughtering every living being on the face of the planet."
Author: Darren Shan

14. "In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes--courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc.--can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.Nature has no compassion. It is, in the words of William Blake, "a creation that groans, living on the death; where fish and bird and beast and tree and metal and stone live by devouring." Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death."
Author: Eric Hoffer

15. "Ruthless is the temper of royalty; How much better to live among the equals.Let me decline in a safe old age. The very name of the "middle way"."
Author: Euripides

16. "The computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. In so doing, it seduces people into thinking that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as an instrument for achieving things, not for contemplating things. It narrows dramatically what we know and intended by reason."
Author: George Friedman

17. "A man is called a traitor, or liberator. A rich man is a theif or philanthropist. Is one a crusader or ruthless invader? It's all in which label is able to persist."
Author: Gregory Maguire

18. "If she was on the porch when we passed, we would be raked by her wrathful gaze, subjected to ruthless interrogation regarding our behaviour, and given a melancholy prediction on what we would amount to when we grew up, which was always nothing."
Author: Harper Lee

19. "Because Spencer is a certifiable genius, Ford is as ruthless as they come, and I'm an accomplished liar."
Author: J.A. Huss

20. "On the existence and threat of modern-day secret societies: We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence . . . building a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. —JOHN F. KENNEDY, FROM A SPEECH GIVEN AT THE WALDORF-ASTORIA HOTEL ON APRIL 27, 1961"
Author: James Rollins

21. "I'm absolutely gonna win it, because I'm ruthless. I sit at the poker table and my job is to destroy people."
Author: James Woods

22. "There is an efficiency inspired by love which goes far beyond and is much greater than the efficiency of ambition; and without love, which brings an integrated understanding of life, efficiency breeds ruthlessness. Is this not what is actually taking place all over the world? Our present education is geared to industrialization and war, its principal aim being to develop efficiency; and we are caught in this machine of ruthless competition and mutual destruction. If education leads to war, if it teaches us to destroy or be destroyed, has it not utterly failed?"
Author: Jiddu Krishnamurti

23. "We tend to read each other's books in sizeable chunks as they are written. I don't know that you could say we are ruthless with each other - in fact, I suppose we are very kind. There are ways to make suggestions which are not destructive."
Author: Jonathan Kellerman

24. "Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:The horror! The horror!"
Author: Joseph Conrad

25. "And yet I have known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An elemental force is ruthlessly frank"
Author: Joseph Conrad

26. "Traits that are common among psychopathic serial killers--a grandiose sense of self-worth, persuasiveness, superficial charm, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, and the manipulation of others--are also shared by politicians and world leaders."
Author: Kevin Dutton

27. "Only a man could come up with something so ruthless, so essentially stupid and yet brutally effective."
Author: Liane Moriarty

28. "Scorpions are quite ruthless, you know. That is why Artemis bid one of them to kill her foe Orion. And as a reward she set the scorpion on up in the sky. I'm not ruthless. I merely do whatever it takes to achive my goalsThat's not ruthless?"
Author: Lisa Kleypas

29. "Truthless times need timeless truths."
Author: Mark Driscoll

30. "Ruthless!' She pretended to shiver. 'I have never seen you be ruthless, I don't think, Thomas. I am very much interested in this new facet of your personality.'Thomas quietly rubbed at the head of his cane. She was beautiful, this woman. Perfect, really. Tall and slender, her hands like a choreographed ballet as they slid against her thigh one moment, and then brushed at her hair which was never out of place.Perfect, everything about her. But suddenly Thomas realized that perfection was not always pure. Amelia's perfection, in that instant, seemed tainted. As if perhaps her perfection had come from some other source than God."
Author: Mia Ryan

31. "I always like to reveal the fact that the emperor has no clothes. And children are best at that. They teach us how to see the world in that sense. They are without artifice; they see it for what it is. I am drawn to that ruthless honesty."
Author: Mira Nair

32. "It wasn't just movies that couldn't contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end. I knew I would forget this within the hour, and then remember, and forget, and remember. Each time I remembered it would be a tiny miracle, and forgetting was just as important — I had to believe in my own story."
Author: Miranda July

33. "And how do you propose we sort this out?" His voice was wonderfully hoarse.She smiled, a devilish glint in her eyes. "Oh, I'm sure we can figure something out." Her gaze dropped to the hefty bulge in his pants.Dear God.Her mouth suddenly went dry. Her bravado faltered. She wasn't nearlyas confident as she pretended.Unconsciously, she licked her bottom lip. If possible, the prodigiousbulge seemed to grow a little bigger. He appeared to be in a great deal ofpain, but Elizabeth was discovering that she had a rather ruthless streakwhen it came to this man.She approached him slowly,"
Author: Monica McCarty

34. "Chess is ruthless: you've got to be prepared to kill people."
Author: Nigel Short

35. "Only a wise man could see my people so clearly in so short a time. Only a ruthless one would say it all out loud. Your virtue and your flaw- we need them both."
Author: Orson Scott Card

36. "From one small spark a bushfire grows.Sellers of misery are our foes.Merging ruthlessly tongues of flame.Point your finger at those to blame."
Author: Paul Anthony

37. "But it's a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating."
Author: Paul Harding

38. "Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all this seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of an individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands too. Collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who warned: 'Once lead this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance."
Author: Paul Johnson

39. "They just sat there looking back at me. The orange queen was clacking her typewriter. Cop talk was no more treat for her than legs to a dance director. They had the calm weathered faces of healthy men in hard condition. They had the eyes they always have, cloudy and grey like freezing water. The firm set mouth, the hard little wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, the hard hollow meaningless stare, not quite cruel and a thousand miles from kind. The dull ready-made clothes, worn without style, with a sort of contempt; the look of men who are poor and yet proud of their power, watching always for ways to make it felt, to shove it into you and twist it and grin and watch you squirm, ruthless without malice, cruel and yet not always unkind. What would you expect them to be? Civilization had no meaning for them. All they saw of it was the failures, the dirt, the dregs, the aberrations and the disgust."
Author: Raymond Chandler

40. "People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him."
Author: Robert Kennedy

41. "You exist by the Weavers' grace. Only as long as you are what they expect of you. Do not understand how fragile that is? But if you replace your other, you might be safe. You might make your familiars happy, and then they will always keep you. So if only for my sake, child, hope that happens.""I don't wish for her to die!""Then I will wish it," she replies ruthlessly."
Author: Sangu Mandanna

42. "Who is Nando?" Cesare asked. "Rocco's son," I replied. "A child." Make no mistake, Cesare was a selfish and ruthless man. The entire course of his life proves this. But for all that, he could on ocassion actually be a man - and by that I do not mean that he possessed scrotum and penis, as does the rudest hog rooting in a sty. He had an instinct to care for those weaker than himself, especially children, whom he liked and valued far more than he did most adults. But just then he was very young and lacking in the thin - in Cesare's case, extremely thin - veneer of civilization that most men manage to acquire as they pass through life. That being the case, he gave voice to what was, in all honesty, my own instinctive response to Rocco's news. "Merda." I could not have put it better."
Author: Sara Poole

43. "The awakening an artist must be ruthless, not only with herself but with others."
Author: Steven Pressfield

44. "And God the taste of undercover on my tongue again, the brush of it down the little hairs on my arms. I'd thought I remembered what it was like, every detail, but I'd been wrong: memories are nothing, soft as gauze against the ruthless razor-fineness of that edge, beautiful and lethal, one tiny slip and it'll slice to the bone."
Author: Tana French

45. "He 's ruthless only because of his ideals. Unfortunately he doesn't succeed. The thing fails and gets out of hand and takes charge of him. Idealism is the only excuse he could have and it's a great excuse."
Author: Terence Fisher

46. "Today is filled with anger, fueled with hidden hate. Scared of being outkast, afraid of common fate. Today is build on tragedies which no one want's to face. Nightmares to humanity and morally disgraced. Tonight is filled with Rage, violence in the air. Children bred with ruthlessness cause no one at home cares. Tonight I lay my head down but the pressure never stops,knowing that my sanity content when I'm droped.But tomorrow I see change, a chance to build a new, build on spirit intent of heart and ideas based on truth. Tomorrow I wake with second wind and strong because of pride.I know I fought with all my heart to keep the dream alive."
Author: Tupac Shakur

47. "The impetuous creature--a pirate--started forward, sprang away; she had to hold the rail to steady herself, for a pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching a passenger, or ignoring a passenger, squeezing eel-like and arrogant in between, and then rushing insolently all sails spread up Whitehall."
Author: Virginia Woolf

48. "I had not then acquired the technique that I flatter myself now enables me to deal competently with the works of modern artist. If this were the place I could write a very neat little guide to enable the amateur of pictures to deal to the satisfaction of their painters with the most diverse manifestations of the creative instinct. There is the intense ‘By God!' that acknowledges the power of the ruthless realist, the ‘It's so awfully sincere' that covers your embarrassment when you are shown the coloured photograph of an alderman's widow, the low whistle that exhibits your admiration for the post-impressionist, the ‘Terribly amusing' that expresses what you feel about the cubist, the ‘Oh!' of one who is overcome, the ‘Ah!' of him whose breath is taken away."
Author: W. Somerset Maugham

49. "Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!"
Author: Winston Churchill

50. "I only back people with track record who can execute ruthlessly and flawlessly... Real killers...no matter the industry or company geography"
Author: Ziad K. Abdelnour

Ruthless Quotes Pictures