Quotes by Authors - Page 223

To sublime: to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state.To sublimate: to divert the expression of an instinctual desire or impulse from its primitive form to one that is considered more socially or culturally acceptable.Sublime: of outstanding spiritual, intellectual, or moral worth.
Rachel Klein
[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people.
Jane Jacobs
In a society... so madly in love with oxymoron's... ask yourself this... ...when was the last time you ever bought anything for free?
Non Nomen
Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.
Neal Stephenson
The problem with a lot people is, they are more concerned about their image than they are about their reputation. It should be the other way around.
Carroll Bryant
if there isn’t a them, there can’t be an us.
Jodi Picoult
Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence
Arthur C. Clarke
There were two classes of charitable people: one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.
Charles Dickens
What is most personal is most universal.
Carl R. Rogers
Grayson noticed me next to the lockers. He pointed at me then held his arms out magnanimously. “You’re welcome, new girl,” he said. “I just saved you from having to find a nice way to say no to the leg dragger.
Laura Anderson Kurk
I’d known cruelty in a school—cruelty that would keep these amateurs up all night. But this kind of scene—crowds batting around a person because they thought he was weak—happened to be my personal trigger.
Laura Anderson Kurk
There is within me a knot of cruelty borne by the stream of love, much as our blood sometimes bears the seed of our destruction ...
James Hurst
Jack laughed behind him, a mirthless sound from a man who had been on the wrong end of life's ironies too many times.
R.D. Ronald
To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It's never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it's on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel. It's at a moment like this, don't you think, while one's vaguely watching the sun as it peeps through the leaves of the trees above a well-mown lawn? Every possible nightmare in the world, every possible nightmare in history, has come into being like this.
Yukio Mishima
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
It’s that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money.It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, “Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Polish-Jewish skin it’s made of, we find that’s best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.” And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, “Treblinka – 100% human stereate.” Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is
J.M. Coetzee
in every pleasure, cruelty has its place...
Oscar Wilde
Sometimes you can be so deeply wrapped up in a person that the only way to deal with it is to use cruelty to push them away.
L.H. Cosway
There is no redemption in a cruel man's love.
Nenia Campbell
Silence!” Korbolo snapped. He eyed Duiker. “You are the historian who rode with Coltaine.”The historian faced him. “I am.”“You are a soldier.”“As you say.”“I do, and so you shall die with these soldiers, in a manner no different-““You mean to slaughter ten thousand unarmed men and women, Korbolo Dom?”“I mean to cripple Tavore before she even sets foot on this continent. I mean to make her too furious to think. I mean to crack that façade so she dreams of vengeance day and night, poisoning her every decision.”“You always fashioned yourself as the Empire’s harshest Fist, didn’t you, Korbolo Dom? As if cruelty’s a virtue…
Steven Erikson
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.
Mike Carey
Ordinary men wonder why those of only average intelligence so often rise to the highest levels of power, while highly intelligent people generally do not. They fail to understand that reaching the highest levels of power has nothing to do with admired attributes such as intelligence and competence. The predominant characteristic of those who rise to the highest levels of power is a total disregard for the consequences – including death – that will befall thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of human beings if it is deemed necessary to attain his (or her) goals. Generally speaking, it is this total disregard for humanity that has distinguished ‘rulers’ throughout history.
Dave Champion
I close my eyes, knowing that afterward we will fall asleep together on our small mattress, as we do every night, listening to the wind in the palm trees outside our window, believing in our thick dreams that we are capable of nothing cruel.
Andrew Porter
Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.
Bryant McGill
A suffering or tortured animal always filled her with such a surge of sympathy that it lifted her clean out of herself.
L.M. Montgomery
It’s cruelty that gets to me. Still, it’s important to read about cruelty.“Why is it important?” Because when you read about it, it’s easier to recognize. That was always the hardest thing in the refugee camps—to hear the stories of the people who had been raped or mutilated or forced to watch a parent or a sister or a child be raped or killed. It’s very hard to come face-to-face with such cruelty. But people can be cruel in lots of ways, some very subtle. I think that’s why we all need to read about it. I think that’s one of the amazing things about Tennessee Williams’s plays. He was so attuned to cruelty—the way Stanley treats Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. It starts with asides and looks and put-downs. There are so many great examples from Shakespeare—when Goneril torments King Lear or the way Iago speaks to Othello. And what I love about Dickens is the way he presents all types of cruelty. You need to learn to recognize these things right from the start. Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.
Will Schwalbe
We are stronger than stigma, but until more celebrity role models openly discuss mental illness we will still be stereotyped as less than capable, by an upside down world that thinks reality television is actually normal behavior.
Shannon L. Alder
Don’t fool yourself: we all have a cruel streak. We keep it under lock and key either because we’re afraid of getting punished or because we believe this will somehow make a difference, make the world a better place.
Tana French
You don't repay kindness with needless cruelty.
Gloria Naylor
Of all mankind's unpleasant habits, sheer and willful cruelty is the most base, the least forgivable and, when carried to its extreme, perhaps the most horrific.
Christopher Riche Evans
Also, I'm angry. I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why does it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?
Stephen King
The only thing crueler than a cage sosmall that a bird can’t fly is a cage solarge that a bird thinks it can fly.
Caroline Kepnes
So who is cruel? You, cruel reader, you are.
Johnny Rich
Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.
Marcel Proust
People talk sometimes of 'bestial' cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beast; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically, so artfully cruel.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Such a brute should underneath all his braggart tricks, his viciousness, his vileness, be a coward. But I am convinced that he was not. Because even cowardice requires a certain degree of sensitivity, and a certain value for life.
Warren Eyster
I know about sureness,' said Didactylos. 'I remember, before I was blind, I went to Omnia once. And in your Citadel I saw a crowd stoning a man to death in a pit. Ever seen that?''It has to be done,' Brutha mumbled. 'So the soul can be shriven and-''Don't know about the soul. Never been that kind of philosopher,' said Didactylos. 'All I know is, it was a horrible sight.''The state of the body is not-''Oh, I'm not talking about the poor bugger in the pit,' said the philosopher. 'I'm talking about the people throwing the stones. They were sure all right. They were sure it wasn't them in the pit. You could see it in their faces. So glad it wan't them in the pit that they were throwing just as hard as they could.
Terry Pratchett
…one of those dreadful boarding schools. It was down on the South Coast. I think some very unpleasant things happened there…. So many lives were distorted by such cruelty. I know so many men who had to put up with that, so many….
Alexander McCall Smith
…did it make a difference if the remark never got back to the person about whom it was made? She thought not. The harm is done when the words are uttered: that is the act of belittlement, the act of diminishing the other, and it is that act which would cause pain to the victim. You said that about me? The wrong was located in the making of the cruel remark, rather than in the pain it might later cause.
Alexander McCall Smith
Words can be as deadly as bullets. But bullets are faster acting. ~ Brandon Hull
Jayden Hunter
My mother always says that indifference is the greatest cruelty.
Mark T. Mustian
I always take credit for my acts of cruelty. To do otherwise is cowardice.
Neal Shusterman
God is so cruel," she murmured reflectively, as though answering him."Yes," he admitted, from the vantage point of going blind. "Though maybe people are kinder if He made them that way.""You've run with a different crowd. Rich people are nicer to rich people.""Sure. Yes. That's why I've washed up here. Rich people couldn't have been nicer to me.
Edward Hoagland
There is an undercurrent of savagery in the human psyche. Anyone who forgets this and doesn’t guard against it, risks being swept away by it.
Lance Conrad
I'm not a cruel man. I mean, technically I'm not a man at all.
Erin Bow
...some of it's how he acts like he's King Shit of Turd Mountain, but mostly it's that he's sneaky, and he likes to hurt
Stephen King
I wish something would happen to me, something that would show me exactly how cruel and jealous and vengeful I can be. Then I could go back to gentleness because I chose it over brutality for its own sake, not because I didn't have the courage to be cruel. I might even like cruelty. I doubt very much that I would, but I ought to find out.
Peter S Beagle
She builds people up because she knows what it is like to be torn down.
Shannon L. Alder
No decent person deliberately chooses to be violent or cruel. We must remove our blinkers and learn that in order to live according to our true values, we need to stop viewing animals as commodities to be used, abused and killed for our own selfish benefit.
Mango Wodzak
Sometimes it's a revelation, even to me, how much more comfortable I am with cruelty than with kindness.
Amy Engel
The only thing worse than cruelty is delegated cruelty.
Matthew Scully
Sentimentalist” is the abuse with which people counter the accusation that they are cruel, thereby implying that to be sentimental is worse than to be cruel, which it isn’t.
Brigid Brophy
There are always two people involved in cruelty, aren't there? One to be vicious and someone to suffer! And what's the use of getting rid of - of wickedness, say - in the outside world if you let it creep back into things from inside you?
Margaret Mahy
I'm afraid it's not nonsense," Genghis said, shaking his turbaned head and continuing his story. "As I was saying before the little girl interrupted me, the baby didn't dash off with the other orphans. She just sat there like a sack of flour. So I walked over to her and gave her a kick to get her moving.""Excellent idea!" Nero said. "What a wonderful story this is! And then what happened?""Well, at first it seemed like I'd kicked a big hole in the baby," Genghis said, his eyes shining, "which seemed lucky, because Sunny was a terrible athlete and it would have been a blessing to put her out of her misery."Nero clapped his hands. "I know just what you mean, Genghis," he said. "She's a terrible secretary as well.""But she did all that stapling," Mr. Remora protested. "Shut up and let the coach finish his story," Nero said."But when I looked down," Genghis continued, "I saw that I hadn't kicked a hole in a baby. I'd kicked a hole in a bag of flour! I'd been tricked!""That's terrible!" Nero cried.
Lemony Snicket
It's the worst kind of cruelty — the thoughtless kind. You can't cope with it.
L.M. Montgomery
Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
Martin Amis
We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
John Updike
Cruelty is easy, cheap and rampant.
Brené Brown
If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals.Can we tell a new story?
Jonathan Safran Foer
In a cruel land, you either learned to laugh at cruelty or spent your life weeping.
Robert Jordan