Human Cruelty Quotes

#1. People who need therapy are in Afghanistan. They've seen horrible human cruelty and degradation, but they don't have time or the money for therapy.

David Chase

#2. Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless.

David Mitchell

#3. He's ours now. Not made by evil, but birthed by human cruelty. (Mortent Leader)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#4. Human compassion is equal to human cruelty, and it is up to each of us to tip the balance.

Alice Walker

#5. Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.

Victor Hugo

#6. It must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery.

C.S. Lewis

#7. There's a lot of cruelty going on all the time, and I'm not just talking about inter-human cruelty. I'm talking about whole species becoming extinct, asteroids hitting planets, black holes gobbling up stars.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#8. Human cruelty took the form of a pact with the deity. A solemn oath was made to kill everything, in which people forbade themselves any display of reason or compassion. A city or a land was devoted to destruction and it was believed an insult to God if one did not observe the abominable oath.

Ernest Renan

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

Martin Amis

#10. Never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty.

Edna O'Brien

#11. As custodians of the planet it is our responsibility to deal with all species with kindness, love, and compassion. That these animals suffer through human cruelty is beyond understanding. Please help to stop this madness.

Richard Gere

#12. The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn.

Pope John Paul II

#13. As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.

Steven Pinker

#14. Human cruelty and treachery surpassed all understanding. There were no answers. Only excuses.

Dean Koontz

#15. It seems to me that few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. And

Sam Harris

#16. The photographs of the inmates at Bergen-Belsen or Andersonville Prison or the bodies in the ditch at My Lai disturb us in a singular fashion because those instances of egregious human cruelty were committed for the most part by baptized Christians.

James Lee Burke

#17. I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#18. No baseness or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter our human world, but that loyal love shall be able in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason its fitting deed of atonement.

Josiah Royce

#19. The worst cruelty that can be inflicted on a human being is isolation.

Sukarno

#20. Cruelty is a part of nature, at least of human nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us.

Robinson Jeffers

#21. Unless we have courage to recognize cruelty for what it is-whether its victim is human or animal-we cannot expect things to be much better in the world.

Rachel Carson

#22. It's all too much for her, the cruelty of human beings.

Gillian Flynn

#23. I want to study human... madness... cruelty... agression... anger... craziness... and other features... I want to find how far can they get!

Deyth Banger

#24. There is something in meanness which excites a species of resentment that never subsides, and something in cruelty which stirs up the heart to the highest agony of human hatred.

Thomas Paine

#25. One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal an get away with it.

Margaret Mead

#26. Why is there ever this perverse cruelty in humankind, that makes us hurt most those we love best?

Jacqueline Carey

#27. Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches and in punishment there is so much that is festive!

Friedrich Nietzsche

#28. 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.

Ashley Montagu

#29. The so-called Real World. Human misery and sadness. Blind politics and general cruelty.

Tanith Lee

#30. Inhumanity is part of humanity as much as suffering is a part of stories. Cruelty is written in the human script.

Johnny Rich

#31. 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.

Charlie Chaplin

#32. Deliberate cruelty to our defenceless and beautiful little cousins is surely one of the meanest and most detestable vices of which a human being can be guilty.

William Ralph Inge

#33. How can I escape a cage build by man?

PureDragonWolf

#34. There is an undercurrent of savagery in the human psyche. Anyone who forgets this and doesn't guard against it, risks being swept away by it.

Lance Conrad

#35. I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

J.M. Coetzee

#36. 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

#37. The excuse or toleration of cruelty upon any living creature by a woman is a deadly sin against the grandest force in nature - maternal love ... In not a single instance known to science has the cure of any human disease resulted necessarily from this fallacious method of research.

Elizabeth Blackwell

#38. Dictatorships, wars, and cruelty drive whole countries to madness. My theory is that the human species was crazy from the very first and that civilization and culture are only enhancing man's insanity.
A Tale of Two Sisters

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#39. This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy. Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wake up nights.

Stephen King

#40. To really have that awareness, to be as open as possible, all the time, to beauty and cruelty and stupid human fallibility and unexpected grace.

Joel Lovell

#41. To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [ ... ] Without cruelty there is no festival.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#42. I dislike poor teachers. They are criminals to me. I've seen so much cruelty toward children. I've seen so many children not given the opportunity to live up to their potential as human beings.

Pat Conroy

#43. Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer. It doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow His precepts - there is just too much misery and cruelty for that.

Benjamin Spock

#44. What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

Storm Jameson

#45. [He was disgusted] at the beasts who in callous cruelty had dragged down and maimed and destroyed the human dignity of this selfless man. Yet it was nothing new. It had been like this at some point in every civilization and on every continent. There were human jackals for every human disaster.

Pat Frank

#46. It is strange the way trauma deadens curiosity. To suffer cruelty in excess is to be delivered from care. The human heart sets aside its questions when the future is too capricious. This is the irony of tribulation.
To know the world will never be so bad.

R. Scott Bakker

#47. This hideous doctrine of eternal torment after death has probably caused more terror and misery, more cruelty and more violation of natural human sympathy, than any belief in the history of mankind. Yet this doctrine was taught unambiguously by Jesus.

Margaret E. Knight

#48. Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.

Andrea Dworkin

#49. Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.

Storm Jameson

#50. We have only one heart, and the same wretchedness which leads us to mistreat an animal will not be long in showing itself in our relationships with other people. Every act of cruelty towards any creature is contrary to human dignity.

Pope Francis

#51. To me, cruelty is the worst of human sins. Once we accept that a living creature has feelings and suffers pain, then by knowingly and deliberately inflicting suffering on that creature, we are guilty, whether it be human or animal.

Jane Goodall

#52. The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.

Saul D. Alinsky

#53. He has seen enough of daily evil to be thankful for small goods that come his way.

Bernard Pomerance

#54. We can never be gods, after all
but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.

N.K. Jemisin

#55. Nevertheless, in this sea of human wretchedness and malice there bloomed at times compassion, as a pale flower blooms in a putrid marsh.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

#56. My work is basically an outgrowth of the anger I feel about the human condition. The aspects of it that make me angry are our capacity for cruelty and the ability people have to ignore situations they don't like.

Bruce Nauman

#57. Enduring and forgiving are two different things. You must not forgive the cruelty of this world. It's our duty as human beings to be angry at injustice. But we must also endure it. Because someone must sever this chain of hatred.

Hiromu Arakawa

#58. What interests me is love, sex, death, cruelty, compassion and the desire for meaning in an apparently godless universe. In other words the human condition.

Glen Duncan

#59. Men like that - when they know they won't be found out - they will do anything.

Michelle Paver

#60. Our zeal works wonders, whenever it supports our inclination toward hatred, cruelty, ambition.

Michel De Montaigne

#61. Kindness and compassion towards all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Conversely, cruelty, whether it is directed against human beings or against animals, is not the exclusive province of any one culture or community of people.

Cesar Chavez

#62. She'd been acutely aware that terror, betrayal, and cruelty had a human face, but she had not sufficiently appreciated that courage, kindness, and love had a human face as well.

Dean Koontz

#63. A DIVINE IMAGE Cruelty has a human heart, And Jealousy a human face; Terror the human form divine, And Secresy the human dress. The human dress is forged iron, The human form a fiery forge, The human face a furnace sealed, The human heart its hungry gorge.

William Blake

#64. There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency - which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours - to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#65. True monsters are not those lurking under the bed, but the ones sleeping in it.

Silje Akselberg Iversen

#66. He spoke with a raven's voice, old and wise and far above the cruelty of the human race.

Alice Hoffman

#67. It seemed hard to believe that human beings could be capable of such cruelty, and in the name of God. Sickened

Hillary Rodham Clinton

#68. People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence.

Philip Pullman

#69. We represent the true human condition, the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos ... Our true home is the imagination, and our kingdom is the wide-open world.

Lemony Snicket

#70. Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable.

Jodie Foster

#71. Today, I marvel at the vegan foods in the supermarket, at the cruelty-free clothing choices in stores, and at the fantastic alternatives to dissection in schools, the modern ways to test medicines without killing rabbits and beagles, the many forms of entertainment involving purely human performers.

Ingrid Newkirk

#72. Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.

Alice Walker

#73. So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence.

John Fowles

#74. Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

John Berger

#75. I have seen Tasmanian devils battle over a carcass. I have seen lionesses crowding a kill, dingoes on the trail of a feral piglet, and adult croc thrashing its prey to pieces. But never, in all the animal world, have I witnessed anything to match the casual cruelty of the human being.

Terri Irwin

#76. Humans, I finally decided after a few more minutes of watching him, are paradoxically capable of both unattainable depths of kindness and unimaginable depths of cruelty, sometimes within the same body ...

Kiley MacLeod

#77. Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

Hannibal

#78. All cruelty comes from weakness, just as all human compassion can come only from strength.

Peyton Quinn

#79. In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other's blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven's love.

Aberjhani

#80. Some people
Are worthy of a bullet straight
to the heart because that is where
cruelty evolves into evil.
Some
humans aren't human at all,
despite how they appear.
Humanity is what lives inside
people,
harbored beneath skin, flesh,
and bone.

Ellen Hopkins

#81. Their prejudice allowed white Southerners to look the other way when blacks were denied their most basic human rights, and it encouraged the worst of them to engage in unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence.

Linda Chavez

#82. If blood can produce money through rituals or the so-called human sacrifice, then it is the basis on which we live, so it is very essential to save and protect it from the fiendish eyes of blood sucking predators.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#83. When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty.

Mary Doria Russell

#84. I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.

Karen Joy Fowler

#85. And in that hour,
The seeds of cruelty, that since have swell'd
To such gigantic and enormous growth,
Were sown in human nature's fruitful soil.
Hence date the persecution and the pain
That man inflicts on all inferior kinds,
Regardless of their plaints.

William Cowper

#86. We, as human beings, have the capacity for extreme cruelty.

Lupita Nyong'o

#87. We still have a long way to go. But we are moving in the right direction. If only we can overcome cruelty, to human and animal, with love and compassion we shall stand at the threshold of a new era in human moral and spiritual evolution - and realize, at last, our most unique quality: humanity.

Jane Goodall

#88. Gradually, however, she revealed a frustration with the willful ignorance that is an abiding human trait, an indignation at the cruelty that people visit upon one another. She might see the world as hopeless, but she believed it did not have to remain that way.

Dean Koontz

#89. A good deed done to an animal is as meritorious as a good deed done to a human being, while an act of cruelty to an animal is a bad as an act of cruelty to a human being.

Muhammad

#90. Cruelty might be very human and very cultural, but it is not acceptable and it is not an option.

Jodie Foster

#91. The sight of her made him understand why he'd lost his faith in God.

Sarah Langan

#92. How many times do you read about 'the Cinderella story,' the story of the underdog, the story of the ordinary human being, often subjected to cruelty and ignorance and neglect, who somehow triumphs?

Kenneth Branagh

#93. You wrong me. You wrong me, Mole. I loathe and despise this human trait of hounding smaller creatures to death, with large numbers opposed against one solitary animal. But, don't you see, it's the law of the wild. This poor fox is sacrificed today to the humans' cruelty.

Colin Dann

#94. And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?

Joseph Conrad

#95. I knew about the terrorism of the human spirit and understood that ruthless, immoral forces had planted alien flags in my soul. The plebe system gave cruelty a good name, disguised sadism in the severe raiment of duty.

Pat Conroy

#96. Cruelty to animals is contrary to man's duty to himself, because it deadens in him the feeling of sympathy for their sufferings, and thus a natural tendency that is very useful to morality in relation to other human beings is weakened.

Immanuel Kant

#97. You are about to enter the realms of human beings. Be prepared for cruelty and kindness, for friendship and hatred. People are made of all possibilities and conditions.

Stuart Hill

#98. Mediation and reconciliation work is about a profound quest for justice and social transformation. But at the same time, they are about service, solidarity, about exploring and rediscovering the human spirit that has been lost or shattered through human conflict, cruelty, ignorance and greed ...

Hizkias Assefa

#99. To insult someone we call him 'bestial'. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.

Isaac Asimov

#100. There are a lot of myths which make the human race cruel and barbarous and unkind. Good and Evil, Sin and Crime, Free Will and the like delusions made to excuse God for damning men and to excuse men for crucifying each other.

Clarence Darrow