Cruelty Quotes - Page 34

• Life happened. In all its banality, brutality, cruelty, unfairness. But also in its beauty, pleasures and delights. Life happened.

  Thrity Umrigar

  Brutality, Delight, Life Happens

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• The food we eat masks so much cruelty. The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, how capitalism has colonized our minds. The fact that we look no further than the commodity itself, the fact that we refuse to understand the relationships that underly the commodities that we use on a daily basis. And so food is like that.

  Angela Davis

  Country, Thinking, Mind

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• Leaving traces of ourselves, as in creative productivity, could then be seen as part of the definition of consciousness for us as well. We know that in order to progress we must stretch for something just out of reach--if only for a life that will be more compassionate and decent than the cruelty, paranoia, greed, narrow corporatism, or narcissism we mostly indulge in and find such ample justification for. And so we dream.

  Breyten Breytenbach

  Dream, Order, Indulge In

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• Savor kindness because cruelty is always possible later.

  Jenny Holzer

  Kindness

  Jenny Holzer, Stefan Banz, Thomas Whitridge, Béatrix Ruf (2001). “Jenny Holzer: xenon”

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• I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Life, Pain, Compassion

  1820 Prometheus Unbound, act 1, l.303-5.

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• The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Beautiful, Eye, Dark

  Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “The Tombs of Atuan: The Second Book of Earthsea”, p.53, Hachette UK

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• Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.

  Zadie Smith

  Energy, World, Misplaced

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• It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.

  Thomas Paine

  Men, Belief, Murder

  Thomas Paine (2011). “The Age of Reason”, p.119, Broadview Press

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• Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Tribes, Injustice, Sin

  Robert A. Heinlein (2007). “Glory Road”, p.144, Macmillan

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• Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Animal, Vegetarianism, Justice

  "Animal life in Jewish tradition: attitudes and relationships". Book by Elijah Judah Schochet, p. 297, 1984.

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• Well used are those cruelties (if it is permitted to speak well of evil) that are carried out in a single stroke, done out of necessity to protect oneself, and are not continued but are instead converted into the greatest possible benefits for the subjects. Badly used are those cruelties which. although being few at the outset, grow with the passing time instead of disappearing. Those who follow the first method can remedy their condition with God and with men; the others cannot possibly survive.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Men, Evil, Done

  Niccolo Machiavelli (1979). “The Portable Machiavelli”, p.75, Penguin

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• The mystery of life--its inexplicability, beauty, cruelty, tenderness, folly . . . has occupied the greater part of my waking thoughts; and in reverence or rage or irony, as the moment or situation might dictate, I have pondered and even demanded of cosmic energy to know Why.

  Theodore Dreiser

  Energy, Might, Waking

  Theodore Dreiser (1977). “Theodore Dreiser: a selection of uncollected prose”, Wayne State Univ Pr

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• For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness.

  Alain Badiou

  Hands, Order, Enemy

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• If you hit a Talib, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty. You must fight others through peace and through dialogue and through education.

  Malala Yousafzai

  Fighting, Differences, Would Be

  "How Malala, Teen Activist Shot By Taliban, Made Jon Stewart’s Jaw Drop" by Eleanor Goldberg, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 9, 2013.

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• But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.

  Malcolm Bradbury

  Fate, Actions Have Consequences, People

  Malcolm Bradbury (2012). “Eating People is Wrong”, p.172, Pan Macmillan

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• The more we come in contact with animals and observe their behaviour, the more we love them, for we see how great is their care of the young.

  Immanuel Kant

  Love, Animal, Compassion

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• May I reach That purest heaven - be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony; Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty. Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in the diffusion ever more intense! So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.

  George Eliot

  Love, Sweet, Agony

  George Eliot (1900). “Armgart: The Spanish Gypsy, and Other Poems”

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• War provides an outlet for every evil element in man's nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in positions of power the vulgar and base.

  C. E. M. Joad

  War, Men, Position Of Power

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• There is something in animals beside the power of motion. They are not machines; they feel.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Compassion, Animal, Power

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• Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.

  Antonin Artaud

  Theatre, Diligence, Unrelenting

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• Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Self, Holocaust, Rabbits

  J. M. Coetzee (2016). “The Lives of Animals: The Lives of Animals [Princeton Classics]”, p.21, Princeton University Press

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• The things I saw beggar description ... The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where there were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda".

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Men, Hands, Order

  "Commemorating The 70th Anniversary Of Liberation", www.ushmm.org.

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• Tolerance of Cruelty in any form is a degraded state of mind and soul. When we freely allow the massacre and prolonged torture of defenseless creatures, it increases our receptivity to human cruelty and war and steals our humanity, peace and soul. Very little speeds and greases your way to Hell, like animal cruelty.

  Russell Boyd

  War, Animal, Soul

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• Now what is it moves our very hearts, and sickens us so much at cruelty shown to poor brutes? I suppose this first, that they have done no harm; next, that they have no power whatever of resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims which makes their sufferings so especially touching.

  John Henry Newman

  Moving, Heart, Animal

  "Parochial and Plain Sermons".

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• We have abolished human bondage because it cursed those who imposed it. It is now our bounden duty to oppose cruelty to those creatures of our common Father which share with man the mystery of life.

  S. Parkes Cadman

  Father, Animal, Men

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