Quotes About Cruelty

Even the most sensitive person can get used to even the most insensitive thing. Cruelty isn’t a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit.

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.

If one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but if a lot of people are unkind to animals (especially in the name of profit) the cruelty is condoned and will be defended by otherwise intelligent people.

The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as Displaced Persons as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.

Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

There is something going on now in Mexico that I happen to think is cruelty to animals. What I'm talking about, of course, is cat juggling.

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. Extract from 'Memories of childhood and youth.'

Cruelty is more cruell, if we defer the pain.

Let us be honest with each other. The threat to marriage is not the gays. It is a lack of loving commitment - whether it is found in the form of neglect, indifference, cruelty or adultery, to name just a few manifestations of the loveless desert in which too many marriages come to grief.

I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them.

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. --Blanche Dubois

Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!

Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination ... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.

Exercise power by means of kindness, and you may be causing more damage than you could by cruelty. Neither approach is correct.

Eternal punishment must be eternal cruelty, and I do not see how any man, unless he has the brain of an idiot, or the heart of a wild beast, can believe in eternal punishment.

The vast carnival of cruelty called animal exploitation goes on and on - and it is all so needless, even counter-productive. There is already an adequate (often superior) non-animal substitute for virtually everything obtained by animal suffering and slaughter.

I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and reason, as the worst of all the vices. But then I am so soft in this that I cannot seea chicken's neck wrung without distress, and cannot bear to hear the squealing of a hare between the teeth of my hounds.

There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself

there is only one unpardonable sin--deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven.

Fear is the parent of cruelty.

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

In other words, I’m against cheating, greed, cruelty, racism, imperialism, religious fundamentalism, treason, and the seemingly limitless capacity for hypocrisy shown by Bush and his administration.

I traded cowardice for cruelty; I traded weakness for ferocity.

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.

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.

There's a certain edge about cruelty. If you're honest about it, most people wince, but say it had to be said.

There is an accumulative cruelty in a number of men, though none in particular are ill natured.

The recklessness with which we sacrifice our sense of decency to maximize profit in the factory farming process sets a pattern for cruelty to our own kind.

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.

Cruelty to animals can become violence to humans.

We have abolished human bondage because it cursed those who imposed it. It is now our bounden duty to oppose cruelty to those creatures of our common Father which share with man the mystery of life.

Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.

Why is there ever this perverse cruelty in humankind, that makes us hurt most those we love best?

The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.

... In contrast to the "banality of evil," which posits that ordinary people can be responsible for the most despicable acts of cruelty and degradation of their fellows, I posit the "banality of heroism," which unfurls the banner of the heroic Everyman and Everywoman who heed the call to service to humanity when their time comes to act. When that bell rings, they will know that it rings for them. It sounds a call to uphold what is best in human nature that rises above the powerful pressures of Situation and System as the profound assertion of human dignity opposing evil.

I am very sad for men and women trapped in any relationship where there is cruelty, dominance, inequity. I long for the liberation of all people.

It is my sincere opinion that our precious time on earth should not be spent attempting to justify unbelievable acts of cruelty, death, and disease as a part of 'God’s Plan' or the greater good — and clinging to ancient texts that preach ill-concealed bigotry and sexism. Instead, we should find ways to make this life happy and satisfying, without regard to the unknowable nature of an afterlife.

Philosophy is the only excuse God has for his cruelty and vanity.

Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty - necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.

Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

Cruelty does not make a person dishonest, the same way bravery does not make a person kind.

My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred.

When children see animals in a circus, they learn that animals exist for our amusement. Quite apart from the cruelty involved in training and confining these animals, the whole idea that we should enjoy the humiliating spectacle of an elephant or lion made to perform circus tricks shows a lack of respect for the animals as individuals.

There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.

The food we eat masks so much cruelty. The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, how capitalism has colonized our minds. The fact that we look no further than the commodity itself, the fact that we refuse to understand the relationships that underly the commodities that we use on a daily basis. And so food is like that.

I revear all the gods but those that delight in cruelty. If Ra's light is kindly in your eyes than may his light shine on us all.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.

We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?