530 Quotes About Cruelty

And it seemed as though for a moment, the world encapsulated them in a giant sigh. As if the world was exhausted by humanity—by the bellows of war and bullets, of hateful cries and grieving tears. Of all the pain, the endless pain humanity had brought into its peaceful existence. A great heaving sigh to wash it all away. But like the sea, when washed away, war only crashed harder, a surging line of arched backs and brackish tears.

We live in a cruel world, Isabel," he says, without looking at me. "I am only a man, and will not always live up to your expectations. And to me, that is a painful reality. But we must never be cruel to one another. Let there be peace between us.

The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.

Don’t fool yourself: we all have a cruel streak. We keep it under lock and key either because we’re afraid of getting punished or because we believe this will somehow make a difference, make the world a better place.

You don't repay kindness with needless cruelty.

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?

Of all mankind's unpleasant habits, sheer and willful cruelty is the most base, the least forgivable and, when carried to its extreme, perhaps the most horrific.

Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.

The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.