Cruelty Quotes

The weakest and most timorous are the most revengeful and implacable.

When a man's willing and eager God joins in.

April is the crudest month breeding Lilacs out of the dead land mixing Memory and desire stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

T.S Eliot

Man is worse than an animal when he is an animal.

Rabindranath Tagore

Men are always wicked at bottom unless they are made good by some compulsion.

Niccolò Machiavelli

God bears with the wicked but not forever.

Cervantes

Weak men are apt to be cruel because they stick at nothing that may repair the ill effect of their mistakes.

George

All cruelty springs from weakness.

Seneca

I must be cruel Only to be kind.

William Shakespeare

We are oftener treacherous through weakness than through calculation.

La Rochefoucauld

When we do evil We and our victims Are equally bewildered.

W.H. Auden

Half of the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm - but the harm does not interest them.

T.S Eliot

We all have flaws and mine is being wicked.

James Thurber

Why inflict pain on oneself when so many others are ready to save us the trouble?

George W. Pacaud

It is not linen you're wearing out But human creatures' lives.

Thomas Hood

All cruelty springs from weakness.

Seneca

I must be cruel only to be kind.

William Shakespeare

Decisiveness is often the art of timely cruelty.

Henry Becque

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

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

But man, proud man,Dress'd in a little brief authority,Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd—His glassy essence—like an angry apePlays such fantastic tricks before high heavenAs makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,Would all themselves laugh mortal.

William Shakespeare

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

There is no redemption in a cruel man's love.

Nenia Campbell

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

in every pleasure, cruelty has its place...

Oscar Wilde

Astarte has come again, more powerful than before. She possesses me. She lies in wait for me.December 97My cruelty has also returned: the cruelty which frightens me. It lies dormant for months, for years, and then all at once awakens, bursts forth and - once the crisis is over - leaves me in mortal terror of myself.Just now in the avenue of the Bois, I whipped my dog till he bled, and for nothing - for not coming immediately when I called! The poor animal was there before me, his spine arched, cowering close to the ground, with his great, almost human, eyes fixed on me... and his lamentable howling! It was as though he were waiting for the butcher! But it was as if a kind of drunkenness had possessed me. The more I struck out the more I wanted to strike; every shudder of that quivering flesh filled me with some incomprehensible ardour. A circle of onlookers formed around me, and I only stopped myself for the sake of my self-respect.Afterwards, I was ashamed.I am always ashamed of myself nowadays. The pulse of life has always filled me with a peculiar rage to destroy. When I think of two beings in love, I experience an agonising sensation; by virtue of some bizarre backlash, there is something which smothers and oppresses me, and I suffocate, to the point of anguish.Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night to the muted hubbub of bumps and voices which suddenly become perceptible in the dormant city - all the cries of sexual excitement and sensuality which are the nocturnal respiration of cities - I feel weak. They rise up around me, submerging me in a sluggish flux of embraces and a tide of spasms. A crushing weight presses down on my chest; a cold sweat breaks out on my brow and my heart is heavy - so heavy that I have to get up, run bare-foot and breathless, to my window, and open both shutters, trying desperately to breathe. What an atrocious sensation it is! It is as if two arms of steel bear down upon my shoulders and a kind of hunger hollows out my stomach, tearing apart my whole being! A hunger to exterminate love.Oh, those nights! The long hours I have spent at my window, bent over the immobile trees of the square and the paving-stones of the deserted street, on watch in the silence of the city, starting at the least noise! The nights I have passed, my heart hammering in anguish, wretchedly and impatiently waiting for my torment to consent to leave me, and for my desire to fold up the heavy wings which beat inside the walls of my being like the wings of some great fluttering bird!Oh, my cruel and interminable nights of impotent rebellion against the rutting of Paris abed: those nights when I would have liked to embrace all the bodies, to suck in all the breaths and sup all the mouths... those nights which would find me, in the morning, prostrate on the carpet, scratching it still with inert and ineffectual fingers... fingers which never know anything but emptiness, whose nails are still taut with the passion of murder twenty-four hours after the crises... nails which I will one day end up plunging into the satined flesh of a neck, and...It is quite clear, you see, that I am possessed by a demon... a demon which doctors would treat with some bromide or with all-healing sal ammoniac! As if medicines could ever be imagined to be effective against such evil!

Jean Lorrain

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

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

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

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

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

All animals understand love and affection, but only man shows the propensity to place himself into the shoes of another life form

The Cruxshadows

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

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

In knowing "what's best" for our patients, we tyrannize them with our good intentions. Behind our benevolent persona, our ruthless shadow is letting out the clutch.

guggenhbuhl-craig

…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

…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

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

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

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

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

So who is cruel? You, cruel reader, you are.

Johnny Rich

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

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

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

You don't repay kindness with needless cruelty.

Gloria Naylor

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

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?

Bernard Shaw George

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

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

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

I have a high art: I hurt with cruelty those who would wound me.

Archilochus

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

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

The only thing worse than cruelty is delegated cruelty.

Matthew Scully

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

Amy Engel

I think unfortunately society nowadays picks upon the fact that we should all fit into this perfect little box, perfect little label. Everybody has to be labelled, because that's what makes human beings feel comfortable, I know what that is. If they can't do that, they start thinking that's obviously not right.

BBC Radio 4

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

When we're struck with cruelty, we can either inflict the same on others like it's a rite of passage, or decide that here is where it stops.

Joyce Rachelle

She builds people up because she knows what it is like to be torn down.

Shannon L. Alder

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Cruelty Quotes

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