Quotes About Cruelty

“Man is the cruelest animal.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“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.”
― Philip Pullman

“The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness - and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.”
― Cornelia Funke, The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath

“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.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

“The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion in the only guarantee of morality.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

“True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”
― Yukio Mishima

“We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“I've always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you're over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he's not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he's into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags.”
― Tana French, Faithful Place

“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it. ”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

“All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.”
― Tennessee Williams

“All cruelty springs from weakness.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Seneca's Morals: Of a Happy Life, Benefits, Anger and Clemency

“Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.

--Blanche Dubois”
― Tennessee Williams, Viva Modern Interpretations A Streetcar Named Desire

“Goodness, real goodness, has it's own sort of cruelty to it.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“I must be cruel only to be kind;
Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“I don't believe in the concept of hell, but if I did I would think of it as filled with people who were cruel to animals.”
― Gary Larson

“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.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.”
― David Foster Wallace

“10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.”
― Susan Sontag

“In a cruel land, you either learned to laugh at cruelty or spent your life weeping.”
― Robert Jordan, A Crown of Swords

“Denna is a wild thing," I explained. "Like a hind or a summer storm. If a storm blows down your house, or breaks a tree, you don't say the storm was mean. It was cruel. It acted according to its nature and something unfortunately was hurt. The same is true of Denna.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing personal. That's the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn't make me feel stupid. If anything, it flattered my intelligence. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid.

Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts.”
― Rob Sheffield, Love is a Mix Tape

“But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people.”
― Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines

“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, Eating Animals

“I think cruelty is just loneliness disguised as bitterness.”
― Tom Hiddleston