Cruelty Quotes

For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.

~ Frederick Douglass

However miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery.

~ Emily Brontë

My mother always tells me that anyone who gets enjoyment from other people's misery will eventually get the greatest discomfort from his or her own miseries.

~ Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.

~ Chris Cleave

Boasting about badness without actively involving in badness is mere madness.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Your tears are never invisible---there is always an insecure woman that lights up when you point them out.

~ Shannon L. Alder

I meant that the hatred of that July day in Nashville was alive and well on that horrible day in Pittsburgh. People hate others so they strike like snakes. It’s all connected—we’re all connected, bumping around into each other, some of us good, some bad, most a mixture. Every thought acted upon has consequences. Every one.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Goodness, real goodness, has it's own sort of cruelty to it.

~ Cassandra Clare

No, you listen! All my life, you've told me that the world is a dark, cruel place. But now I see that the only thing dark and cruel about it is people like you!

~ Salvatore Quasimodo

There is no honor in cruelty.

~ Jocelyn Murray

If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal.

~ Edward St. Aubyn

Where was my guardian angel when I needed him most? If only I knew.

~ A. Esquivel

We had no compunction toward our enemies [the ants] and took to increasingly desperate and violent means of dealing with them. If we noticed they'd laid siege to a snack, we might trap them in a circle drawn with water and take away whatever they were eating, then watch them scurry about in confusion before wiping them off the floor with a wet cloth. I took pleasure in seeing them shrivel into black points when burning coals were rolled over them. When they attacked an unwashed pan or cup they'd soon be mercilessly drowned. I suppose initially each of us did these things only when we were alone, but in time, we began to be openly cruel. We came around to Amma's view of them as demons come to swallow our home and became a family that took pleasure in their destruction. We might have changed houses since, but habits are harder to change.

~ Vivek Shanbhag

Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the 'last days' before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they took as certain proof that the Apocalypse was imminent. Again like fundamentalists today, they looked on the prospect of the violent destruction of mankind without turning a hair. The remarkable similarity between the first Tudor Puritans and the fanatics among today's Christian fundamentalists extends to their selective reading of the Bible, their emphasis on the Book of Revelation, their certainty of their rightness, even to their phraseology. Where the Book of Revelation is concerned, I share the view of Guy, that the early church fathers released something very dangerous on the world when, after much deliberation, they decided to include it in the Christian c

~ C.j. Sansom

Don't kill me,' said the knight. 'I yield. I yield. You can't kill a man at mercy.'Lancelot put up his sword and went back from the knight, as if he were going back from his own soul. He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind.'Get up,' he said. 'I won't hurt you. Get up, go.'The knight looked at him, on all fours like a dog, and stood up, crouching uncertainly.Lancelot went away and was sick.

~ T.h. White

If you haven't caused a scene in a psych unit, it's just because you haven't been inside long enough.

~ Victor Lavalle

He's probably divorced. Mental cruelty.

~ Margaret Way

He had discovered that there was not just one God but many, and some were more than cruel — they were insane, and that changed all. Cruelty, after all, was understandable. With insanity, however, there was no arguing.

~ Stephen King

None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones -- not even the lion.He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment.The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him without killing him, and then turned the unsconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime.

~ Beryl Markham

Cruelty is the surest sign of stupidity.

~ Marty Rubin

Inhumanity is the keynote of stupidity in power.

~ Alexander Berkman

I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

. . . have not some religions, including the most influential forms of Christianity, taught that the heart of man is totally corrupt? How could the course of religion in its entire sweep not be marked by practices that are shameful in their cruelty and lustfulness, and by beliefs that are degraded and intellectually incredible? What else than what we can find could be expected, in the case of people having little knowledge and no secure method of knowing; with primitive institutions, and with so little control of natural forces that they lived in a constant state of fear?

~ John Dewey

If I’m a monster, mademoiselle, it’s because man’s cruelty has made me so.

~ Rachel L. Demeter

Though you are three times more beautiful than angels,Though you are the sister of the river willows,I will kill you with my singing,Without spilling your blood on the ground.Not touching you with my hand,Not giving you one glance, I will stop loving you,But with your unimaginable groansI will finally slake my thirst.From her, who wandered the earth before me,Crueler than ice, more fiery than flame,From her, who still exists in the ether—From her you will set me free.

~ Anna Akhmatova

Cruelty is a language that the blind can see, the deaf can hear, and the heart feels forever.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Narcissists are consumed with maintaining a shallow false self to others. They're emotionally crippled souls that are addicted to attention. Because of this they use a multitude of games, in order to receive adoration. Sadly, they are the most ungodly of God's creations because they don't show remorse for their actions, take steps to make amends or have empathy for others. They are morally bankrupt.

~ Shannon L. Alder

The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.

~ Albert Camus

Remember this! It is never an entire people who is cruel, it is merely individuals who exert their will on others.

~ Sujata Massey

Remorse shows the difference between a cruel person and one that is not.

~ Federico Chini

Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without impact. Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Something caught in her throat at this second thanks, when she'd threatened him so brutally. When you're a monster, she thought, you are thanked and praised for not behaving like a monster. She would like to restrain from cruelty and receive no admiration for it.

~ Kristin Cashore

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.--Blanche Dubois

~ Tennessee Williams

In a cruel land, you either learned to laugh at cruelty or spent your life weeping.

~ Robert Jordan

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals.Can we tell a new story?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Cruelty is easy, cheap and rampant.

~ Brené Brown

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

~ John Updike

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

~ Martin Amis

It's the worst kind of cruelty — the thoughtless kind. You can't cope with it.

~ L.m. Montgomery