Cruelty Quotes - Page 15

• Cruelty in all countries is the companion of anger; but there is only one, and never was another on the globe, where she coquets both with anger and mirth.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Country, Cuckoos, Mirth

  Walter Savage Landor (1826). “Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen”, p.453

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• When cruelty is inflicted on innocent people, it discredits whatever cause.

  Ronald Reagan

  People, Causes, Innocent

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1988). “Ronald Reagan”

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• Trees and flowers were often more meaningful to me than people. They always helped me, consoled me, giving the soul a chance to believe once more than the world was beautiful and sensible, that the mad absurdities and cruelties of men were against the laws of Nature and the Universal Mind; that sooner or later violence would suffer utter defeat on this Earth. No words collected in books were more effectively convincing to me than foliage, clouds, rippling waters, rain.

  Svetlana Alliluyeva

  Beautiful, Meaningful, Nature

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• A modern and humane civilization must control conception or sink into barbaric cruelty to individuals.

  Marie Stopes

  Civilization, Birth Control, Modern

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• To drive men from independence to live on alms, is itself great cruelty.

  Edmund Burke

  Men, Independence, Welfare

  Edmund Burke (1852). “The Works and Correspondance of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke”, p.237

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• The very name of a politician, a statesman, is sure to cause terror and hatred; it has always connected with it the ideas of treachery, cruelty, fraud, and tyranny.

  Edmund Burke

  Names, Ideas, Hatred

  Edmund Burke (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Edmund Burke (Illustrated)”, p.33, Delphi Classics

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• While the poet entertains he continues to search for eternal truths, for the essence of being. In his own fashion he tries to solve the riddle of time and change, to find an answer to suffering, to reveal love in the very abyss of cruelty and injustice. Strange as these words may sound I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet--whom Plato banned from his Republic--may rise up to save us all.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Fashion, Plato, War

  Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph C. Landis (1986). “Aspects of I.B. Singer”

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• Cruelty is the only sin.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Sin

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• Cruelty, I truly believe, is the one and only sin.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Believe, Sin

  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, Pamela R. Matthews (2005). “Perfect Companionship: Ellen Glasgow's Selected Correspondence with Women”, p.231, University of Virginia Press

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• 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 is the only guarantee of morality.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Positive, Philosophical, Compassion

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2016). “101 Facts of life”, p.8, Publishdrive

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• All I have left is my anger at the foolishness of the world. The unnecessary cruelties, the pomposity and vanity of people who should know better. Most of the time I just want to shake some sense into the world.

  Stephen Hunt

  Vanity, People, World

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• When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty.

  Mary Doria Russell

  Kindness, War, Generosity

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• I was thanking him for...well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.

  Arthur Golden

  Thanking Him, World, Found

  Arthur Golden (2008). “Memoirs Of A Geisha”, p.113, Random House

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• 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

  Opinion, Guilty, Deliberate

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• I must be cruel only to be kind; Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.

  William Shakespeare

  Memorable, Denmark In Hamlet, Hamlet And Ophelia

  William Shakespeare, John Payne Collier (1839). “Hamlet”, p.59

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• He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Dog, Cat, Animal

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• 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.

  Graham Greene

  Revenge, Worry, Tests

  GRAHAM GREENE (1966). “THE COMEDIANS”

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• I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives: the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance. . . and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own families.

  Stephen King

  Real, Cancer, Believe

  Stephen King (2002). “The Shining”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

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• You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy does not reserve a plot for weeds

  Dag Hammarskjold

  Weed, Truth, Animal

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• That's just how white folks will do you. It wasn't merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn't know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserved of their scorn.

  Barack Obama

  Laughter, Mean, White

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams From My Father”, p.80, Canongate Books

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• Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.

  C. S. Lewis

  Sorry, Hate, Men

  C. S. Lewis (1952). “Mere Christianity: a revised and enlarged edition, with a new introduction, of the three books, The case for Christianity, Christian behaviour, and Beyond personality”, Scribner Paper Fiction

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• If everyone in the world sat quietly at the same time, closed their eyes and concentrated as hard as they could on peace and goodwill, all the killing and cruelty in the world would continue. And probably increase.

  George Carlin

  Peace, Eye, World

  George Carlin (2004). “When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?”, Hyperion

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• They're all cruel,' he said. 'The world I come from, the world you come from, and this one, too. Maybe the people don't see the cruelty in your world right away, it's better hidden, but it's there all the same.

  Cornelia Funke

  People, World, Said

  Cornelia Funke (2011). “Inkspell”, p.497, Scholastic Inc.

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• There's a hole in the world like a great black pit and the vermin of the world inhabit it and its morals aren't worth what a pig could spit and it goes by the name of London. At the top of the hole sit the privileged few Making mock of the vermin in the lonely zoo turning beauty to filth and greed... I too have sailed the world and seen its wonders, for the cruelty of men is as wonderous as Peru but there's no place like London!

  Stephen Sondheim

  Lonely, Zoos, Men

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• The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Children, Teaching, Hands

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