Quotes About Cruelty

Do I need to argue to Your Honor that cruelty only breeds cruelty? That hatred only causes hatred; that if there is any way to soften this human heart which is hard enough at its best, if there is any way to kill evil and hatred and all that goes with it, it is not through evil and hatred and cruelty; it is through charity, and love, and understanding?

Cruelty is cruelty, whether it's cruelty to children, to the elderly, to dogs and cats, or to chickens.

The truth of the matter is the real story are the people who rise above all of this incredible cruelty. Otherwise that cruelty wins.

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.

If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America - even those designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants.’ If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles.

What has marked Chinese society is its level of cruelty, not just revolutions and wars. We ought to reject it totally, otherwise in another upheaval there will be further cruelty.

At no point did the [Burns] committee conclude, or even attempt to conclude, an assessment of cruelty. Yet many bodies have erroneously quoted the Burns report, stating that it clearly demonstrated that the practice of hunting wild animals with dogs caused cruelty. The report did not state that.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

For woman's chief want is to feel that she is wanted. Therefore it is that with women, cruelty is more easily borne than coldness. Indeed, It is astonishing how much downright cruelty a woman will stand from the man she loves or has loved. What women admire is a subtle combination of forcefulness and gentleness. If a woman has to choose between forcefulness and gentleness, always she will sacrifice the latter.

... if this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would be a of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

The very good people didn't convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands — and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference.

During the ages of faith the Church argued, not illogically, that any degree of cruelty towards sinners and heretics was justified, if there was a chance that it could save them, or others, from the eternal torments of hell. Thus, in the name of the religion of love, hundreds of thousands of people were not merely killed but atrociously tortured in ways that made the gas chambers of Beslen seem humane.

Never was the victory of patience more complete than in the early church. The anvil broke the hammer by bearing all the blows that the hammer could place upon it. The patience of the saints was stronger than the cruelty of tyrants.

I'm very touched on a deep level by cruelty to animals.

I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.

With the first act of cruelty committed in the name of revolution, with the first murder, with the first purge and execution, we have lost the revolution.

A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was.

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. --Blanche Dubois

Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor.

Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as “cruelty.

Every time I sit down to eat, I cast my lot: for mercy, against misery; for the oppressed, against the oppressor; and for compassion, against cruelty. There is a lot of suffering in the world, but how much suffering can be addressed with literally no time or effort on our part? We can just stop supporting it, by making different choices.

It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.

We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.

Sentient compassion is a must; it has to be developed in order to alleviate cruelty and thoughtless acts. That won't happen if you develop a sense of compassion. You'll have that connectedness, that knowing that the same life that's in you is in every other being, so you're not going to mishandle life.

London has always been a haven for victims of cruelty, and been improved by them. Yet I can see it changing now. Outsiders are demonised, there are little bits of legislation, people are scared.

Cruelty is the highest pleasure to the cruel man; it is his love.

There is no more evil thing in this world than race prejudice, none at all. [...] It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty, and abomination than any other sort of error in the world.

Mohammed praises [instances of] tretchery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, and bigotry that are utterly incompatible with civilized society.

Gratuitous cruelty borders on the pathological, psychotic and that becomes uninteresting because there is no choice.

My own experience has taught me not to underestimate the power of those who protest against cruelty. I'd also say that there may be a tendency to view the animal-rights opposition in somewhat distorted fashion as a new development, as the product of a very recent enlightenment about the rights due to animals.

Intelligence is derived from two words - inter and legere - inter meaning 'between' and legere meaning 'to choose'. An intelligent person, therefore, is one who has learned 'to choose between'. He knows that good is better than evil, that confidence should supersede fear, that love is superior to hate, that gentleness is better than cruelty, forbearance than intolerance, compassion than arrogance, and that truth has more virtue than ignorance.

The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.

The human soul finds its saddest imprisonment when it is helpless in the presence of cruelty, when it cannot right a wrong. It finds its highest freedom when it can secure justice to others.

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.

So, that was Nature's way. The mosquito felt pain and panic but the dragonfly knew nothing of cruelty. Humans would call it evil, the big dragonfly destroying the mosquito and ignoring the little insects suffering. Yet humans hated mosquitoes too, calling them vicious and bloodthirsty. All these words, words like 'evil' and 'vicious', they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.

Oh - oh, why is it that the members of a family feel privileged to treat one another with a cruelty they would not exhibit to the merest stranger?

Music doth extenuate fears furies appeaseth cruelty abateth heaviness and to such as are wakeful it causeth quiet rest; it cures all irksomeness and heaviness of soul.

People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.

Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People travelled with them.

The mystery of life--its inexplicability, beauty, cruelty, tenderness, folly . . . has occupied the greater part of my waking thoughts; and in reverence or rage or irony, as the moment or situation might dictate, I have pondered and even demanded of cosmic energy to know Why.

Girls at war opt for a quieter cruelty than fistfights and drive-by shootings. Girls circumvent the corporeal and go straight for each other's souls. The bleeding is harder to stanch.

The bust of Colonel Sanders stands as a monument to cruelty and has no place in the Kentucky state Capitol.

But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.

Cowardice is the mother of cruelty.

When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.

I am always struck by how difficult it is for people to see how much cruelty they are bringing not only upon animals but upon themselves and their loved ones and other people, how much we are screwing up the planet, how much we are hurting our own health, how hard it is to change all that, how eager people are to make a buck at everybody else's expense - all those things are discouraging.

Habits of thought lead us to brush aside descriptions of cruelty to animals as emotional, for "animal-lovers only"; or if not that, then anyway the problem is so trivial in comparison to the problems of human beings that no sensible person could give it time and attention. This too is a prejudice - for how can one know that a problem is trivial until one has taken the time to examine its extent?

... the twin concepts of nihilism and the antihero have had it. What began with The Wild One and James "nobody understands me" Dean, ran with increasing vehement negativism up through the Stones and Velvets and Iggy ... [I]t may be time, in spite of all indications to the contrary from the exterior society, to begin thinking in terms of heroes again, of love instead of hate, of energy instead of violence, of strength instead of cruelty, of action instead of reaction.