Cruelty Quotes - Page 32

• The death penalty is barbaric. And I think we as a society need to come face-to-face with that. If we're not willing to face up to the cruelty, we ought not to be doing it.

  Alex Kozinski

  Thinking, Death Penalty

  Source: www.cbsnews.com

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• I began to think of war, even so-called "good wars" like World War II, as corrupting everybody. Violence begetting violence. The good guys beginning to act like the bad guys. And when I studied the history of wars, it seemed to me that that was the case. Athens vs. Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians presumably the democratic state. The Spartans the totalitarian state. But as the war went on, the Athenians began to act like the Spartans. They began committing atrocities and cruelties. So I saw this as a characteristic of war, even so-called "good wars."

  Howard Zinn

  War, Thinking, Guy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We say we embrace humanity, but what does that mean? We are all defined by our limits, so to what extent can we embrace all this? Because we all contain within ourselves equally the capacity for kindness, as much as for cruelty or evil. And the best of us are able to suppress those baser impulses, instincts. That's the war within.

  Todd Solondz

  Kindness, War, Mean

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." This is such a reassuring thing. The world is in God's hands; it is his world. We sinners have messed things up and the amount of human division and cruelty is so terrible, but fortunately God is God.

  Matthew Levering

  Heaven, World, Earth

  Source: www.biblegateway.com

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• Looking at the shape of the world, I see how we're in a time where women are the subject of hatred, fear, and we have to fight that all the time. I feel that there are fights we take for granted. When I look at the world, I see that women are subject to cruelty. And that's why the global gag rule means so much to me, that the United States wouldn't stand up for the rights and health of women.

  Louise Erdrich

  Mean, Fighting, Hatred

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Family seems so rich and complicated to me. There's meant to be this unfailing biological loyalty and yet at the same time it's this theatre for various kinds of cruelty. I know it doesn't always work out that way, but the worst possible behaviour is sort of allowed for. It looks to me like an endlessly rich container for really terrible drama, but also pretty grand love. It accommodates such a variety of feeling in such a natural way, and it feels so relatable, and yet it's such a funny construct, socially, the family.

  Ben Marcus

  Loyalty, Drama, Work Out

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• If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it.

  Margaret Atwood

  Animal, Environmental, Meat

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• Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn!

  Robert Burns

  God, Men, Inhumanity To Man

  "ManWas Made to Mourn" st. 7 (1786)

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• The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

  George W. Bush

  War, Humor, Justice

  Address to Joint Session of Congress Following 9/11 Attacks, delivered 20 September 2001

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• To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.

  Samuel Butler

  Beauty, Pain, Compassion

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• There's a certain cruelty to being on a big screen as your eyelids start to sag and your hair falls out and turns gray that you either have to be able to handle or not. What you can't do is try to force yourself into roles that you could have played or would have played ten years earlier.

  George Clooney

  Fall, Hair, Years

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• Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.

  James Anthony Froude

  Sports, Honesty, Integrity

  Oceana ch. 5 (1886)

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• I'm totally against animal cruelty. I don't have clothes, shoes or bags made from any animal products.

  Leona Lewis

  Animal, Shoes, Clothes

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.

  Bryant H. McGill

  Art, Dark, Men

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• I see that the path of progress has never taken a straight line, but has always been a zigzag course amid the conflicting forces of right and wrong, truth and error, justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy.

  Kelly Miller

  Taken, Errors, Justice

  Kelly Miller (1914). “Out of the house of bondage”

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• If anyone has seen the horrific and unwatchable footage of the Chinese cat and dog trade - animals skinned alive - then they could not possibly argue in favour of China as a caring nation. There are no animal protection laws in China, and this results in the worst animal abuse and cruelty on the planet. It is indefensible.

  Steven Morrissey

  Dog, Cat, Caring

  "Morrissey reignites racism row by calling Chinese a 'subspecies'" by Alexandra Topping, www.theguardian.com. September 3, 2010.

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• When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.

  Ingrid Newkirk

  Dog, Pain, Animal

  "Washingtonian" Magazine, August 1, 1986.

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• S and M is only the expression in the bedroom of an oppressive-submissive relation which can happen also in the kitchen or at the factory, can happen between people of any gender. There is obviously something titillating about these relationships, but it isn't the sexual components that makes them ugly, they're uglier elsewhere. Nothing sexual is depraved. Only cruelty is depraved, and that's another matter.

  Marilyn French

  Expression, People, Kitchen

  Marilyn French (2011). “The Women's Room”, p.391, Simon and Schuster

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• Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wisdom, Religious, Freedom

  "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment". "God in the Dock". Book by C. S. Lewis, 1970.

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• 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

  Memories, Spring, Rain

  The Waste Land l. 1 (1922)

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• I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?

  John Steinbeck

  Life, Kindness, Believe

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• Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.

  Reynolds Price

  Heart, Life Is Short, World

  Reynolds Price (1998). “Clear Pictures: First Loves First Guides”, p.100, Simon and Schuster

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• Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People travelled with them.

  Neil Gaiman

  War, Animal, People

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• My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Writing, Butterfly, Men

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1973). “Strong opinions”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Philosophical, Animal, Thinking

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