Quotes on Cruelty

It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness....Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?

The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

People routinely assume that pornography is such a difficult and divisive issue because it's about sex. In fact, this culture struggles unsuccessfully with pornography because it is about men's cruelty to women, and the pleasure men sometimes take in that cruelty. And that is much more difficult for people-- men and women-- to face.

Religion, politics, society are exploiting you, and you are being conditioned by them; you are being forced in a particular direction. You are not human beings; you are mere cogs in a machine.

What is it the Bible teaches us? -- rapine, cruelty, and murder.

In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll's Essays and Lectures. This was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit.

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?

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.

Rather than converting people from one organised religion to another organised religion, we should try to convert people from misery to happiness, from bondage to liberation and from cruelty to compassion.

In a world of cruelty, sympathy is a crime, and in a world of lies, truth is blasphemy.

World's use is cold, world's love is vain, world's cruelty is bitter bane; but is not the fruit of pain.

Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.

This is the ultimate cruelty, isn't it? That I can talk and talk and to anyone listening, it's only air--too rich a diet to be swallowed by a mundane world.

Those who conduct themselves with morality, integrity and consistency need not fear the forces of inhumanity and cruelty.

I think if you're against cruelty and you look at what happens to animals in slaughterhouses and on factory farms, you have to be completely against eating meat.

Cruelty and fear shake hands together.

Cruelty hardens and degrades, kindness reforms and ennobles.

It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace with another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us.

Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell.