Cruelty Quotes - Page 35

• In the killing of animals there is cruelty, rage, and the accustoming of oneself to the bad habit of shedding innocent blood.

  Joseph Albo

  Animal, Blood, Killing

  Joseph Albo (1929). “ספר העקרים: book of principles”, [Philadelphia

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• To see the convulsions, agonies and tortures of a poor fellow-creature, whom they cannot restore nor recompense, dying to gratify luxury and tickle callous and rank organs, must require a rocky heart, and a great degree of cruelty and ferocity. I cannot find any great difference between feeding on human flesh and feeding on animal flesh, except custom and practice.

  George Cheyne

  Heart, Animal, Practice

  "An Essay on Regimen: Together with Five Discourses, Medical, Moral, and Philosophical". Book by George Cheyne, 1740.

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• An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty. Men who have practiced tortures on animals without pity, relating them without shame, how can they still hold their heads among human beings?

  Samuel Johnson

  Animal, Men, Shame

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• The habit of shedding blood, or even of seeing it shed, corrupts all sentiment of humanity.

  Constantin-Francois Chasseboeuf

  Animal, Compassion, Blood

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• Human dignity begins to assert itself only at the point where man is distinguishable from the beast by pity for it.

  Richard Wagner

  Animal, Men, Compassion

  Richard Wagner (1897). “Religion and Art”, p.210, U of Nebraska Press

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• Once admit that we have the right to inflict unnecessary suffering and you destroy the very basis of human society.

  John Galsworthy

  Animal, Compassion, Suffering

  John Galsworthy (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of John Galsworthy (Illustrated)”, p.7260, Delphi Classics

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• In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.

  Maurice Sendak

  Children, Crazy, Anger

  "'Wild Things' author isn't wild about Hollywood" by Jake Coyle, www.today.com. October 13, 2009.

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• I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We're all cruel, aren't we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that's what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with. I hope the overall view isn't just that though, or I've failed in my writing. There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That's where the real art lies.

  Martin McDonagh

  Art, Real, Drama

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

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• Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.

  Noah Richler

  People, Imagination, Alive

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• Life has shown me all too often that there is no rhyme or reason to the cruelty inflicted upon humanity.

  Cassia Leo

  Humanity, Reason, Rhyme

  Cassia Leo (2014). “Black Box”, p.17, Random House

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• Since you walked out on me I'm getting lovelier by the hour. I glow like a corpse in the dark. No one sees how round and sharp my eyes have grown how my carcass looks like a glass urn, how I hold up things in the rags of my hands, the way I can stand through crippled by lust. No, there's just your cruelty circling my head like a bright rotting halo.

  Nina Cassian

  Broken Heart, Eye, Dark

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• The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.

  William Carlos Williams

  Broken Heart, Love Is, Together

  William Carlos Williams (1967). “Pictures from Brueghel, and Other Poems: Collected Poems, 1950-1962”, p.125, New Directions Publishing

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• The civilised cultures are the most cruel. It's the same with education - often it breeds sadistic forms of cruelty.

  Nellie McKay

  Culture, Sadistic, Form

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• One line typed twenty years ago
  can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
  to glorify art as detachment
  or torture of those we
  did not love but also
  did not want to kill.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Wall, Years

  Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.27, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
  Cruelly, being barren.
  Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

  Sylvia Plath

  Moon, Light, Radiance

  Sylvia Plath (2010). “Ariel”, p.18, Faber & Faber

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• Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime--and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.

  Sigmund Freud

  Plato, Believe, Book

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• Love is not ful of pittie (as men say)
  But deaffe and cruell, where he meanes to pray.

  Christopher Marlowe

  Love, Men, Praying

  Christopher Marlowe (1981). “The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe: Edward II. Doctor Faustus. The first book of Lucan. Ovid's Elegies. Hero and Leander. Miscellaneous poems”

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• Sure
  love is cruel
  and selfish
  and totally obtuse--
  at least, blinded by the light,
  young love is.

  William Carlos Williams

  Selfish, Love Is, Light

  William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.289, New Directions Publishing

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• The cruelty of death lies in the fact that it brings the real sorrow of the end, but not the end. The greatest cruelty of death: an apparent end causes a real sorrow. Our salvation is death, but not this one.

  Franz Kafka

  Life, Death, Real

  Franz Kafka (1991). “The Blue Octavo Notebooks”

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• To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West-Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated.

  James Boswell

  Country, Men, West Indies

  James Boswell (1874). “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: Together with A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides”, p.239

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• When we reflect upon the cruelties daily practised upon such of the animal creation as are given us for food, or which we ensnarefor our diversion, we shall be obliged to own that there is more of the savage in human nature than we are aware of.

  Samuel Richardson

  Animal, Savages, Human Nature

  Samuel Richardson (1755). “A collection of the moral and instructive sentiments, maxims, cautions, and reflexions, contained in the histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison: Digested under proper heads, with references to the volume, ...”, p.109

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• Of all the animals with which this globe is peopled, there is none towards whom nature seems, at first sight, to have exercised more cruelty than towards man, in the numberless wants and necessities with which she has loaded him, and in the slender means which she affords to the relieving these necessities.

  David Hume

  Nature, Mean, Animal

  A Treatise upon Human Nature bk. 3 (1739)

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• Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed the victim. It has been abetted in its blindness by theories, still in keeping with the pedagogical principles of our great- grandparents, according to which children are viewed as crafty creatures, dominated by wicked drives, who invent stories and attack their innocent parents or desire them sexually. In reality, children tend to blame themselves for their parents' cruelty and to absolve the parents, whom they invariably love, of all responsibility.

  Alice Miller

  Children, Responsibility, Reality

  Alice Miller (2012). “The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness”, p.169, Anchor

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• Every work of art should give utterance, or indicate, the awful blind strength and the cruelty of the creative impulse, that is why they must all have what are called errors, both of taste and style.

  Christina Stead

  Strength, Art, Errors

  Christina Stead (1992). “A Web of Friendship: Selected Letters, 1928-1973”, Angus & Robertson Publishers

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• Life, from beginning to end, is fear. Yes, it is pain, yes, it is desire, but more than anything it is fear; a certain amount rational, an enormous amount irrational. All political cruelties stem from that overwhelming fear. To push back the threatening forces, to offer primitive sacrifices, to give up some in the hope that others will be savedthat is the power struggle. That is the outsidedness of the poor, the feeble, the infantile. That is the outsidedness of Jews. That is the outsidedness of blacks. That is the outsidedness of women.

  Vivian Gornick

  Giving Up, Pain, Fear

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