Cruelty Quotes

“Though you are three times more beautiful than angels,
Though you are the sister of the river willows,
I will kill you with my singing,
Without spilling your blood on the ground.
Not touching you with my hand,
Not giving you one glance, I will stop loving you,
But with your unimaginable groans
I will finally slake my thirst.
From her, who wandered the earth before me,
Crueler than ice, more fiery than flame,
From her, who still exists in the ether—
From her you will set me free.”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

“No, we aren't civilized, even in our business suits and high heels. People are as mean as ever, and as predictable. Underneath it all, we are not so different from what lurks in the wild, perhaps we're worse.”
― Donna Lynn Hope

“All classes in proportion to their lack of travel and familiarity with foreign literature are bellicose, prejudiced against foreigners, fond of fighting as a cruel sport -- in short, dog-like in their notions of foreign policy."

[Quoted in Socialism and Foreign Policy and War and the Liberal Conscience]”
― George Bernard Shaw

“The only thing worse than cruelty is delegated cruelty.”
― Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

“People often speak of hell, not wanting to go there, avoiding it..etc. I never had that problem because hell is a state of mind. Look around you; rape, murder, wars, hatred, envy...my friend; you're already there!!”
― Sandra Chami Kassis

“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, The Austere Academy

“It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.

This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing; It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“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, The Changeover

“Why,' I said, quite surprised by my own eloquence in inventing all this stuff, 'it happens every day. The old old story. Boys and girls fall in love, that is, they are driven mad and go blind and deaf and see each other not as human animals with comic noses and bandy legs and voices like frogs, but as angels so full of shining goodness that like hollow turnips with candles put into them, they seem miracles of beauty. And the next minute the candles shoot out sparks and burn their eyes. And they seem to each other like devils, full of spite and cruelty. And they will drive each other mad unless they have grown some imagination. Even enough to laugh.”
― Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth

“Cruel', O'Kelly laughed, 'it's cruel to tell children the truth. If anything convinces me of God's mercy, then it's his gift of making us unable to lie.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, Islanders & The Fisher of Men

“Mitleid mit den Thieren hängt mit der Güte des Charakters so genau zusammen, daß man zuversichtlich behaupten darf, wer gegen Thiere grausam ist, könne kein guter Mensch seyn.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

“It would be both foolish and cumbersome to continue our everyday existences in bliss without first denying to ourselves, for the sake of excusing our own repugnance, the inherent cruelty from which modern civilization was conceived...And there can be no other path by which a fiercely competitive, yet social species, as humanity, can afford its members the level of safety, prosperity and stability—such that we enjoy now— without its initial pangs of cannibalism, brutality, dominance and cruelty to forge the foundations, very much like the lava which formed the ground upon which we now stand. Lava still erupts from the core. Brutality, Dominance, and Cruelty similarly erupt from ours; and they are no less prevalent now than in early human history.”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the 'last days' before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they took as certain proof that the Apocalypse was imminent. Again like fundamentalists today, they looked on the prospect of the violent destruction of mankind without turning a hair. The remarkable similarity between the first Tudor Puritans and the fanatics among today's Christian fundamentalists extends to their selective reading of the Bible, their emphasis on the Book of Revelation, their certainty of their rightness, even to their phraseology. Where the Book of Revelation is concerned, I share the view of Guy, that the early church fathers released something very dangerous on the world when, after much deliberation, they decided to include it in the Christian canon."

[From the author's concluding Historical Note]”
― C.J. Sansom, Revelation

“None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones -- not even the lion.

He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment.

The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him without killing him, and then turned the unsconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“We prayed these wars would end all wars --
In war we know is no romance."

(Done With Bonaparte)”
― Mark Knopfler, Golden Heart

“(...) ograniczenie umysłowe i okrucieństwo ludzkie nie zna granic.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych

“This is a city of those
who turn the pheasant
flying from rhododendron branch
carrying music of life
into crows by consecrating them
to the staples of the temples,
Of those who leave the god
behind in old people’s homes
and search on television after returning home,
Of those who throw human baby into trash container
and suckle dog’s puppies.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Would you rather a god who listens or a god who speaks?”

Be careful with the answer.

It’s as important as every word from Scheherazade’s mouth that saved her life.

And everybody’s got an answer.

A god who listens is like your best friend, who lets you tell him about all the people you don’t like.

A god who speaks is like your best teacher, who tells Brandon Goff he has to leave the room if he’s going to call people falafel monkeys.

A god who listens is your mom who lets you sit in a kitchen and tell her stories about castles in the mountains.

A god who speaks is your dad who calls on the phone with advice for your life in America.

There are gods all over the world who just want you to express yourself. Look inside and find whatever you think you are and that’s all it takes to be good. And there are gods who are so alien to us, with minds so clear, the only thing to do would be to sit at their feet and wait for them to speak, to tell us what is good.

A god who listens is love.

A god who speaks is law.

At their worst, the people who want a god who listens are self-centered. They just want to live in the land of do-as-you-please. And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want laws and justice to crush everything.

I don’t have an answer for you. This is the kind of thing you live your whole life thinking about probably.

Love is empty without justice.

Justice is cruel without love.

Oh, and in case it wasn't obvious, the answer is both.

God should be both.

If a god isn't, that is no God.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“It appears that no one is so unfortunate that he or she is exempt from spending cuts, while at the same time no one is so fortunate as to be ineligible for a tax cut”
― Jonathan Schell

“Jungle is built by the fit, civilization is built by the kind.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“There was no doubt, however, that I felt different, that I was greedily breathing the air, that I had the urge to walk and to smile, that indifference - as well as cruelty - appeared to me as possible forms of virtue.”
― Juan Carlos Onetti, A Dream Come True: The Collected Stories of Juan Carlos Onetti

“But sometimes it feels as if we comfortable people are walking on a flowery meadow that is really a great quaking morass, and underneath there is black slime full of unimagined horrors. A photograph in the newspaper makes a crack and you see down. The War made a tremendous crack. It seemed then as if we were all to be drawn into the slime, as if cruelty had got its fangs into the heart of the world.”
― O. Douglas, Penny Plain

“Er dachte, heute Abend wird in Deutschland im Heeresbericht stehen, dass ein feindlicher Angriff mit großen Verlusten für den Feind abgewiesen ist und dass unsere Verluste gering sind. Gewiss, elf Mann spielen gar keine Rolle. Wir haben ein Millionenheer. Sehr begreiflich, dass man von geringen Verlusten spricht.
Aber er hatte den ersten von diesen elf Mann gesehen. Das war ein älterer Soldat mit einem Vollbart, auf der rechten Hand einen Trauring.
Das begriff Reisiger nicht.”
― Edlef Köppen

“We know that man's a fighting animal by nature, that cruelty's his birthright; and we also know that what keeps us in the pit as animals are the armies and armaments.”
― James Leslie Mitchell, Three Go Back

“The Trump regime’s inhumane cruelty is a typical symptom of fascism.

Fascists use lies as a weapon, to demonize & dehumanize their victims and incite hate & violence.

Fascist propaganda brainwashes people to have no empathy for their victims.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, American Fascism: A German Writer's Urgent Warning To America

“The butcher's knife hath laid low the delight of a fond dam, and the darling of nature is now stretched in gore upon the ground.”
― John Oswald, The Cry of Nature; Or, an Appeal to Mercy and to Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals

“We are all wounded,
looking for a bandaid -
some act like salt,
I choose to be ointment.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“We started to laugh. The laughter started outside of us, I’m sure of it, I would really like to say that’s true.

It was silvery and clean. It was polite and spiteful.

“Please,” Autumn said aloud.

It was the laugh of people in shade looking at people in the baking sun. Our laughter grew outward and we started, of all things, to applaud.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“How come information travels at the speed of light, but empathy travels slower than a sloth!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace