Cruelty Quotes

Shame without repentance doesn’t lose power when it is spoken, it only seeks approval.

~ Shannon L. Alder

To imagine the way we think is the singular causative agent of all we go through is to practice cruelty toward ourselves.

~ Sharon Salzberg

the story is not a pretty one. there is violence in it. And cruelty. But stories that are not pretty have a certain value, too, I suppose. Everything, as you well know (having lived in this world long enough to have figured out a thing or two for yourself), cannont always be sweetness and light.

~ Kate Dicamillo

In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invisible, we have a daily darkness that is night, and we encounter another darkness from time to time that is death, the deaths of those we love, but the third and most constant darkness is with us everyday, at all hours of every day, is the darkness of the mind, the pettiness and meanness and hatred, which we have invited into ourselves, and which we pay out with generous interest.

~ Dean Koontz

Revenge is possible only if you spare the enemy.

~ Raheel Farooq

Remembering that only a few years ago men, women, and even children, were imprisoned, tortured and burned, for having expressed in an exceedingly mild and gentle way, the ideas entertained by me, I congratulate myself that calumny is now the pulpit's last resort. The old instruments of torture are kept only to gratify curiosity; the chains are rusting away, and the demolition of time has allowed even the dungeons of the Inquisition to be visited by light. The church, impotent and malicious, regrets, not the abuse, but the loss of her power, and seeks to hold by falsehood what she gained by cruelty and force, by fire and fear. Christianity cannot live in peace with any other form of faith. If that religion be true, there is but one savior, one inspired book, and but one little narrow grass-grown path that leads to heaven. Such a religion is necessarily uncompromising, unreasoning, aggressive and insolent. Christianity has held all other creeds and forms in infinite contempt, divided the world into enemies and friends, and verified the awful declaration of its founder—a declaration that wet with blood the sword he came to bring, and made the horizon of a thousand years lurid with the fagots' flames.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing personal. That's the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn't make me feel stupid. If anything, it flattered my intelligence. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid.Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts.

~ Rob Sheffield

Did you really cease to love a person because you had been treated cruelly?

~ W. Somerset Maugham

And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again.

~ Orson Scott Card

Lack of courage leads to cruelty.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Nobody should have to choose between a cold heart and a dead heart.

~ Nenia Campbell

If there is a deity of the kind imagined by votaries of the big mail-order religions such as Christianity and Islam, and if this deity is the creator of all things, then it is responsible for cancer, meningitis, millions of spontaneous abortions everyday, mass killings of people in floods and earthquakes-and too great mountain of other natural evils to list besides. It would also,as the putative designer of human nature, ultimately be responsible or the ubiquitous and unbeatable human propensities for hatred, malice, greed, and all other sources of the cruelty and murder people inflict on each other hourly.

~ A.c. Grayling

You can be bit in the leg by a rattlesnake and seek help to heal your wound, or you can run after it and let the poison take your leg. The same is true with love.

~ Shannon L. Alder

...the years have taught me not to wonder too much at the dark things men do. Strange how it is that men never act crueller than when they're fighting for the sake of an idea. We've been killing since Cain over who stands closer to god. It seems to me that cruelty is just in the way of things. You drive yourself mad if you take it all personal. Those who hurt you don't have the power over you they would like. That's why they do what they do. And I'm not going to give them the power now. But it was a cruel thing that they did, and when they had finished hurting me, a splinter of loneliness seemed to break off and stay inside me forever.

~ Marcel Theroux

The cruelty of men had infected the land, and sea only swept in sharp waves to the shores.

~ Gayendra Abeywardane

In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people.

~ Ruth Harrison

I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing; It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.

~ Lorrie Moore

Not one word was said by Moses or Aaron as to the wickedness of depriving a human being of his liberty. Not a word was said in favor of liberty. Not the slightest intimation that a human being was justly entitled to the product of his own labor. Not a word about the cruelty of masters who would destroy even the babes of slave mothers. It seems to me wonderful that this God did not tell the king of Egypt that no nation could enslave another, without also enslaving itself; that it was impossible to put a chain around the limbs of a slave, without putting manacles upon the brain of the master. Why did he not tell him that a nation founded upon slavery could not stand? Instead of declaring these things, instead of appealing to justice, to mercy and to liberty, he resorted to feats of jugglery. Suppose we wished to make a treaty with a barbarous nation, and the president should employ a sleight-of-hand performer as envoy extraordinary, and instruct him, that when he came into the presence of the savage monarch, he should cast down an umbrella or a walking stick, which would change into a lizard or a turtle; what would we think? Would we not regard such a performance as beneath the dignity even of a president? And what would be our feelings if the savage king sent for his sorcerers and had them perform the same feat? If such things would appear puerile and foolish in the president of a great republic, what shall be said when they were resorted to by the creator of all worlds? How small, how contemptible such a God appears!

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

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

Cruel people offer pity when they no longer feel threatened. However, kind people offer compassion and understanding regardless.

~ Shannon L. Alder

...It also taught me that while cruelty can be fun for a few moments, compassion has a much longer shelf life.

~ Doreen Orion

Being kind to someone, only to look kind to others, defeats the purpose of being kind.

~ Shannon L. Alder

In great hearts the cruelty of life gives birth to good.

~ Vasily Grossman

People. They're really innately, inherently gentle and compassionate and kind. That's what wrings, wrenches...something. Your entrails, maybe. The member of the mob who holds up the whole ceremony for seconds or even minutes while he dislodges a family of bugs or lizards from the log he is about to put on the fire.

~ William Faulkner

Live with an open mind and an open heart. Always choose love over fear and kindness over cruelty.

~ Laurence Overmire

Since my arrival in Rome, I have had many opportunities to wonder if compassion’s opposite is cruelty, or to reflect whether or not indifference would serve as a better black to its white.

~ Andrew Levkoff

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

~ William Shakespeare

I coudn't be kind to him after what he'd done, couldn't be cruel after what I had done

~ Rosamund Hodge

It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Sweet mother Mary, boy, think about what you’re doing! Be cruel or be kind, but don’t be both, because now you’ve made a mess you can’t clean up in a hurry.

~ Ursula Vernon

So what if you’re right? So what if you’re wrong? In the end you might be surprised to find that God doesn’t care so much about whether you were right or wrong but whether, despite it all, you were kind or cruel.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Fearlessness is not what you do to win, but what you don't do. When you love yourself as much as your God, you won't see other people as the source of your pain. Rather, you will see who you have become because you honestly believed that your chains would be broken through hatred, instead of kindness.

~ Shannon L. Alder

We have probably all seen teachers who would pick a student up by the scruff of the neck for saying ‘Shit,’ but who would walk by without a word when overhearing that same student taunting a classmate, calling him a ‘fag.’ It is often easier not to intervene — even when there is a clear-cut victim. It’s out in the hall. It isn’t our business. It isn’t our problem.But our inactions, like our actions, define who we are and what are true values are.

~ Richard H. Eyster

What’s the kindest thing you almost did? Is your fear of insomnia stronger than your fear of what awoke you? Are bonsai cruel? Do you love what you love, or just the feeling? Your earliest memories: do you look through your young eyes, or look at your young self? Which feels worse: to know that there are people who do more with less talent, or that there are people with more talent? Do you walk on moving walkways? Should it make any difference that you knew it was wrong �as you were doing it? Would you trade actual intelligence for the perception of being smarter? Why does it bother you when someone at the next table is having a conversation on a cell phone? How many years of your life would you trade for the greatest month of your life? What would you tell your father, if it were possible? Which is changing faster, your body, or your mind? Is it cruel to tell an old person his prognosis? Are you in any way angry at your phone? When you pass �a storefront, do you look at what’s inside, look at your reflection, or neither? Is there anything you would die for if no one could ever know you died for it? If you could be assured that money wouldn’t make �you any small bit happier, would you still want more money? What has �been irrevocably spoiled for you? If your deepest secret became public, �would you be forgiven? Is your best friend your kindest friend? Is it in any way cruel to give a dog a name? Is there anything you feel a need to confess? You know it’s a “murder of crows” and a “wake of buzzards” but it’s a what of ravens, again? What is it about death that you’re �afraid of? How does it make you feel to know that it’s an “unkindness �of ravens”?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Do not build a castle around one act of kindness, do not build an empire around one act of cruelty.

~ Paul Bamikole

The modeling world – and the world at large – is a pretty cruel place. It’s up to you to decide whether or not that turns you into a cruel person as well. Are you going to be mean and selfish because some of the people around you are, or are you going to overcome that and walk away a decent human being? The world gives you every reason in the book to become callous. It’s your job not to become that way as well.

~ Abby Rosmarin

No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

The influence of the iniquitous system necessarily fosters an unfeeling and cruel spirit, even in the bosoms of those who, among their equals, are regarded as humane and generous.

~ Solomon Northup

Despite our disapproval with what God allows us to endure, he still remains the same God that is not interested in our convenience, as much as our character.

~ Shannon L. Alder

...here's what I've learned - people will hurt you, but you don't have to respond - not every mean comment or cruel act deserves to be noticed ...

~ John Geddes