Quotes About Cruelties

#1. The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.

Richard Hofstadter

#2. My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.

David Foster Wallace

#3. He had always listened to the music of a more sensitive man. She had let several relationship cruelties slide because of it.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#4. Sex and writing live on playful cruelties.

Mason Cooley

#5. She turned towards me, put her fingertips against my chest. She was enjoying it somewhat, too, the little betrayal of Mark's memory. She still loved him, differently; now and again there must be these retrospective cruelties, to consolidate her newness, to let her not love him in the old way.

Glen Duncan

#6. Without the presence and energy of art in our lives, we are capable of engaging in heartless activities without remorse and cruelties with clear consciences.

Maya Angelou

#7. Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

Marcel Proust

#8. Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves.

Friedrich Engels

#9. If we could learn to like ourselves, even a little, maybe our cruelties and angers might melt away.

John Steinbeck

#10. Immortality affords you the opportunity to witness history in the making. Humanity's triumphs and its cruelties, both. It is both a high price to pay and a priceless gift, to carry the weight of that knowledge.

Chloe Neill

#11. The Fetch was intelligent, diabolically so, and intelligent people devised intelligent cruelties. That was where the Red Queen had always excelled.

Erika Johansen

#12. Cruelties should be committed all at once.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#13. But one of the cruelties of teenagehood is that you'll never know what your parents were really like at your age, and they'll never accurately remember - not enough to empathize, anyway . . . maybe just enough for pity.

Una LaMarche

#14. If the cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. Because the goal of America is freedom, abused and scorned tho' we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#15. The inferior creatures groan under your cruelties. You hunt them for your pleasure, and overwork them for your covetousness, and kill them for your gluttony, and set them to fight one with another till they die, and count it a sport and a pleasure to behold them worry one another.

Tom Tryon

#16. These small indignities and minor cruelties take a toll. They add to the burden of stress and fatigue that is already present in the workplace and they have real consequences on the every day lives of workers.

P. M. Forni

#17. The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.

C.L.R. James

#18. It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world.

Susan Cain

#19. Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences human remorses, human compensatory fantasies, human terrors, human cruelties. If all men were alike, all the world would worship the same God.

Aldous Huxley

#20. One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.

Susan Sontag

#21. To inflict cruelties on defenceless creatures, or condone such acts, is to abuse one of the cardinal tenets of a civilized society - reverence for life.

Jon Evans

#22. Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.

Will Schwalbe

#23. [On Christianity:] Its lip-service and its empty rites have made it the easiest of all tasks for the usurer to cloak his cruelties, the miser to hide his avarice, the lawyer to condone his lies, the sinner of all social sins to purchase the social immunity from them by outward deference to churches.

Ouida

#24. Those who experiment on animals should never be able to quiet their own conscience by telling themselves that these cruelties have a worthy aim.

Albert Schweitzer

#25. Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

Susan Sontag

#26. My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.

Mark Twain

#27. Throughout the world today there are people who are enduring cruelties and persecution because of their Christian faith. We must pray for them, and for ourselves, so that in our own dying hour God will give us grace to endure until the end, anticipating the certainty of His glory to come.

Billy Graham

#28. The fact is that, in all prisons everywhere, cruelties on the one hand and injudicious laxity of discipline on the other have at times appeared and will, at intervals, be renewed except the most vigilant oversight is maintained.

Dorothea Dix

#29. Why does anger makes people pretty? Rage doesn't. Rage makes you ugly, but a little anger, that just seems to add spice. One of nature's cruelties, or maybe it's to keep us from killing each other more often.

Laurell K. Hamilton

#30. Unlooked-for kindness can cut deep as cruelties if they come at the wrong time.

Lindsay Faye

#31. I am convinced that the world is not a mere bog in which men and women trample themselves and die. Something magnificent is taking place here amidst the cruelties and tragedies, and the supreme challenge to intelligence is that of making the noblest and best in our curious heritage prevail.

Charles A. Beard

#32. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#33. The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.

Thomas Paine

#34. Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar.

Ellen Glasgow

#35. (About Cesare Borgia) What cruelties were not the result of his? Who could count all his crimes? Such was the man that Machiavel prefers to all the great geniuses of his time, and to the heroes of antiquity, and of which he finds the life and action make a good example for those that fortune favors.

Frederick The Great

#36. So perhaps there are no phantom pains after all; perhaps all pain is real; perhaps each long-ago blow lives on into eternity in some different permutation and shape; perhaps the body is this hypersensitive, revengeful entity, a ledger book, a warehouse of remembered slights and cruelties.

Thrity Umrigar

#37. Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties.

Steven Pinker

#38. The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.

Winston Churchill

#39. There is no lesson in cruelties.

K.A. Hosein

#40. We do know now, all of us, that the most appalling cruelties are committed by apparently virtuous governments in expectation of a great good to come, never learning that the evil done now is the sure destroyer of the expected good.

Katherine Anne Porter

#41. What she doesn't like is the cruelties in his past, and in hers, over which she'll have to crawl to get to him.

M.R. Carey

#42. But a soldier ought not to dwell too long on such matters. His life is full of hardship and he must take his pleasure where he can. Though he may take time to reflect upon the cruelties that he sees, place him among his comrades and it is almost impossible for his spirits not to rise. Strange

Susanna Clarke

#43. When we reflect upon the cruelties daily practised upon such of the animal creation as are given us for food, or which we ensnarefor our diversion, we shall be obliged to own that there is more of the savage in human nature than we are aware of.

Samuel Richardson

#44. Love and freedom are such hideous words. So many cruelties have been done in their name.

Joseph O'Connor

#45. The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessity.

Eric Hobsbawm

#46. All I have left is my anger at the foolishness of the world. The unnecessary cruelties, the pomposity and vanity of people who should know better. Most of the time I just want to shake some sense into the world.

Stephen Hunt

#47. To tell the truth is to provide armament against a world too full of cruelties to be defeated with simple falsehoods. If these truths mean the world is less comforting than it might have been, it seems like a pretty small price to pay.

Mira Grant

#48. We can either see our circumstances as a set of random cruelties and then allow those hardships to turn us into bitter victims; or we can recognize the fact that, though we may never comprehend why hard things happen, they do, and when they do, we can reach for a larger purpose beyond the pain.

Amy Purdy

#49. We tell stories of other people's marriages, Detective Hastroll thought. We are experts in their parables and parabolas. Be can we tell the story of our own. If we could, Hastroll thought, there might be no murders. If we could, we might avoid our own cruelties and crimes.

Adam Ross

#50. They felt their cruelties had no implications. They excluded me with no sense of scale. I at least knew my importance.

Louisa Hall

#51. Julie Orringer is the real thing, a breathtaking chronicler of the secrets and cruelties underneath the surface of middle-class American life. These are terrific stories-wise, compassionate and haunting.

Dan Chaon

#52. You are Christians; find out what is true and false in Christianity - and you will then find out what is true. Find out what is true and false in your environment with all its oppressions and cruelties, and then you will find out what is true. Why do you want philosophies?

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#53. A pacifism which can see the cruelties only of occasional military warfare and is blind to the continuous cruelties of our social system is worthless.

Mahatma Gandhi

#54. What is the history of mighty kingdoms and nations, but a detail of the ravages and cruelties of the powerful over the weak?

Abigail Adams

#55. It feels like days since we've made eye contact. We avoid it like we expect to be injured. When did we learn to fear each other? To flinch away from what we imagine the other is thinking, the cruelties we've written and placed in each other's mouths?

Isaac Marion

#56. The obscene and vulgar stories in the Bible are as repugnant to our ideas of the purity of a Divine Being, as the horrid cruelties and murders it ascribes to Him are repugnant to our ideas of His justice.

Thomas Paine

#57. This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries.

Robertson Davies

#58. People, by and large, weren't cruel, weren't heartless; it was simply that they couldn't believe anything could happen

Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

#59. Killing animals to make a fashion statement = a sickening + cold-blooded vanity.

Jess C. Scott