Cruelty Quotes - Page 12

• Misfortune is no excuse for cruelty.

  Ned Vizzini

  No Excuses, Excuse, Misfortunes

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• Women: I liked the colors of their clothing; the way they walked; the cruelty in some faces; now and then the almost pure beauty in another face, totally and enchantingly female. They had it over us: they planned much better and were better organized. While men were watching professional football or drinking beer or bowling, they, the women, were thinking about us, concentrating, studying, deciding - whether to accept us, discard us, exchange us, kill us or whether simply to leave us. In the end it hardly mattered; no matter what they did, we ended up lonely and insane.

  Charles Bukowski

  Football, Lonely, Drinking

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• We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker's, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble.

  C. S. Lewis

  Laughter, Humble, Blood

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.105, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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?

  Diane Ackerman

  Heart, Thinking, Knives

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “A Natural History of Love: Author of the National Bestseller A Natural History of the Senses”, p.20, Vintage

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• Something in him was broken, and through that break spilled a blind cruelty, a need to hurt and to push away

  Cassandra Clare

  Hurt, Broken, Needs

  Cassandra Clare (2013). “Clockwork Prince”, p.11, Simon and Schuster

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• Cruelty isn't a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit.

  Rick Yancey

  Personality, Habit, Traits

  Rick Yancey (2013). “The 5th Wave”, p.132, Penguin

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• In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, its boundless brutality.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Years, Age, Brutality

  Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.153, A&C Black

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• When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Color, Long, Shade

  Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.12, A&C Black

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

  Rick Yancey

  Sensitive Person, Personality, Habit

  Rick Yancey (2013). “The 5th Wave”, p.132, Penguin

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• Cruelty is easy, cheap and rampant.

  Brené Brown

  Easy

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• The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. I hold that the more helpless a creature the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of humankind.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Dog, Nature, Greatness

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• She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.

  Neil Gaiman

  Secret, Storm, Lightning

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• There is cruelty in the world Eliza, you can see that, can't you? It surrounds us. It breathes on us. We spend our life trying to escape it.

  John Boyne

  Trying, World, Breathe

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• Magnus began to be truly alarmed. Will's voice would have shaken, betraying that his cruelty had been part of his playacting, but his son's laugh was that of someone genuinely delighted by the chaos erupting all around him

  Cassandra Clare

  Son, Voice, Laughing

  Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson (2014). “The Bane Chronicles”, p.159, Simon and Schuster

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• [Luke, holding stormtrooper helmet.] Alas, poor stormtrooper, I knew ye not,/ yet have I taken both uniform and life/ From thee. What manner of a man wert thou?/ A man of inf'nite jest or cruelty?/ A man with helpmate and with children too?/ A man who hath his Empire serv'd with pride?/ A man, perhaps, who wish'd for perfect peace?/ What'er thou wert, goodman, thy pardon grant/ Unto the one who took thy place: e'en me.

  Ian Doescher

  Children, Taken, Pride

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• The other thing Aron found about sensitive people is that sometimes they're highly empathic. It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world. They tend to have unusually strong consciences. ... they're acutely aware of the consequences of a lapse in their own behavior.

  Susan Cain

  Strong, People, Tragedy

  Susan Cain (2012). “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”, p.137, Broadway Books

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• An activist is someone who cannot help but fight for something. That person is not usually motivated by a need for power or money or fame, but in fact is driven slightly mad by some injustice, some cruelty, some unfairness, so much so that he or she is compelled by some internal moral engine to act to make it better.

  Eve Ensler

  Fighting, Compassion, Mad

  Jody Williams, Eve Ensler (2013). “My Name is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl's Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize”, p.9, Univ of California Press

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• All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.

  Bell Hooks

  Believe, Commitment, Expression

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• In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development.

  Alice Miller

  Suicide, Bullying, Children

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• So you see, the quality of humor is not a personal or a national monopoly. It's as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant.

  Mark Twain

  Humor, Thinking, Years

  Mark Twain, Gary Scharnhorst (2009). “Mainly the truth: interviews with Mark Twain”, University Alabama Press

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• Freedom is never granted. It is earned by each generation... In the face of tyranny, cruelty, oppression, extremism, sometimes there is only one choice. When the world looks to America, America looks to you, and you never let her down.

  Hillary Clinton

  Patriotic, America, Choices

  "Clinton: Iraq Tactics 'Working. We’re Just Years Too Late...'". Hillary Clinton’s remarks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City, Missouri, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 20, 2007.

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• Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed . . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.

  Thomas Merton

  Peace, War, Fall

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• All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained thereunto either by force or fraud, and what they have by craft or cruelty gained, to cover the foulness of their fact, they call purchase, as a name more honest. Howsoever, he that for want of will or wit useth not those means, must rest in servitude and poverty.

  Walter Raleigh

  Mean, Power, Men

  "The Cabinet Council". Book by Walter Raleigh, Chapter 25, 1658.

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• We have become so accustomed to the religious lie that surrounds us that we do not notice the atrocity, stupidity and cruelty with which the teaching of the Christian church is permeated.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Christian, Religious, Lying

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• If experience be consulted, it will be found there is no action, however abominable, that has not received the applause of some people. Parricide - the sacrifice of children - robbery - usurpation - cruelty - intolerance - prostitution, have all in their turn been licensed actions, and have been deemed laudable and meritorious deeds with some nations of the earth. Above all, Religion has consecrated the most unreasonable, the most revolting customs.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Children, Sacrifice, People

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