cruelty Quotes

“I must be cruel only to be kind; Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.”

“It seems like at some point you’d run out of awful.”

“You teach me now how cruel you’ve been—cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort.”

“I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it.”

“My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”

″‘People tend to overestimate my character,’ I say quietly. ‘They think that because I’m small, or a girl, or a Stiff, I can’t possibly be cruel. But they’re wrong.‘”

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; They kill us for their sport.

“I swore, by the compact of the Sisterhood, that I would do you no harm. Had I not so sworn I would change you into a black-beetle, and I would pull your legs off, one by one, and leave you for the birds to find, for putting me to this indignity.”

“It’s Mother who has to listen to [everyone in the village] laughing,” I pointed out. “I wish I could spare her that.” Father chewed the end of the brush’s wooden handle. “We have the easy part. All we have to do is fly. She has to live in the village.”

“I stared at the brick as it slid across the clean, worn, wooden floor, and at the glass that scattered about my feet. Outside I could hear jeers and shouts. For one moment I glimpsed howling, sweating, red-and-white faces, distorted into hideous masks of hatred and cruelty, a sea of demon heads that bobbed restlessly outside our store. I could not understand the words they were growling out, but their intention was plain. They wanted to burn and loot and hurt. Looking into that huge mass of faces was like looking into the ugliest depths of the human soul.”

“The ducks pecked him, the chickens beat him, and the girl who fed the poultry kicked him with her feet. So at last he ran away, frightening the little birds in the hedge as he flew over the palings.”

“Why don’t they cut their own children’s ears into points to make them look sharp? Why don’t they cut the end off their noses to make them look plucky? One would be just as sensible as the other. What right have they to torment and disfigure God’s creatures?”

“Everywhere one may hear of ravenous dogs and wolves, and cruel men-eaters, but it is not so easy to find states that are well and wisely governed.”

“Making a famine where abundance lies, Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.”

“Human history in all ages is red with blood, and bitter with hate, and stained with cruelties; but not since Biblical times have these features been without a limit of some kind.

“But also because the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us...”

“I’m pragmatic. If I were cruel, I’d give him a eulogy instead of a conversation.”

“I suppose all the old fairy tales are more or less true. And you’re simply a wicked, cruel magician like the ones in the stories. Well, I’ve never read a story in which people of that sort weren’t paid out in the end, and I bet you will be.”

″ ‘Speak’, she begged silently. ‘Give me a reason to stay’. For all his selfishness and cruelty, Kaz was still the boy who had saved her. She wanted to believe he was worth saving, too.”

“I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.”

“Sauron was become now a sorcerer of dreadful power, master of shadows and of phantoms, foul in wisdom, cruel in strength, misshaping what he touched, twisting what he ruled, lord of werewolves; his dominion was torment.”

“My front four teeth are gone, I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut.”

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.”

“What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?”

″ The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others. ”

“Aw, Brick, you—BREAK MY HEART! ”

“The cruel world slipped away from me, and with it went all the other bad things in my life;”

“To think that now never again would that smiling face be seen on their streets—never again would that cheery little voice proclaim the gladness of some everyday experience! It seemed unbelievable, impossible, cruel.”

“I found you as a morsel cold upon Dead Caesar’s trencher. ”

“The place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed.”

“On the third of June, at a minute past two, where once was a person, a flower now grew... The world was much crueler an hour ago. I’m glad someone decided to give flowers a go.”

“For these ten years you’ve lived with everything I’ve lost and loved another woman through it all. And I’m cruel. I could peel you like a pear and God would call it justice ...”

“And besides, it is not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to censure such a practice (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering upon cruelty, which, I confess, hath always been with me the strongest objection against any project, however well intended.”

“Oh, I will be cruel to you, Marya Morevna. It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be. But you understand, don’t you? You are clever enough. I am a demanding creature.”

“I am selfish and cruel and extremely unreasonable. But I am your servant. When you starve I will feed you; when you are sick I will tend you. I crawl at your feet; for before your love, your kisses, I am debased. For you alone I will be weak.”

“Life is a cruel, horrible joke and I am the punch line.”

“Indeed it is evident that Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, must always exert a modifying influence on men’s passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever, as we are protected from smallpox by vaccination.”

″‘You been married?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What happened?’ ‘Mental Cruelty,’ according to the divorce papers. ‘Was it true?’ she asked. ‘Of course: both ways.‘”

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty. ”

“Doesn’t look like much of a god now.”

“It is the lyrical account of a hard-knock provincial childhood and a frighteningly acute psychological study of how cruelty can affect a young mind-a book that is by turns chilling, humorous, and quietly beautiful.”

“Even if the world is cruel, even if all I have is loneliness, I’ll still live with everything I’ve got. Even if this emotion is all I have, I’ll keep struggling.”

“There are always two people involved in cruelty, aren’t there? One to be vicious and someone to suffer!”

“On a recent visit Laura had watched with consternation as the child punished the doll. ‘I’m allowed to do this,’ he said, hitting it less, Laura felt, out of jealousy for the new baby, than because he had been given the chance to be infinitely cruel to something infinitely yielding.”

“Given the chance to be cruel did you get cruelty out of your system by acting on the chance, or did you invite it in?”

″‘What characterizes the human race more?‘, Karla once asked me, ‘cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it?‘”

“I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterizes the human race. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are.”

“people are blunt with one another, sometimes even cruel, believing honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.”

“There is within me (and with sadness I have watched it in others) a knot of cruelty borne by the stream of love, much as our blood sometimes bears the seed of our destruction, and at times I was mean to Doodle.”

“You see, Carter, people are two things: greedy and cruel. So we have a perfect set up here. The greed part—a kid pays a buck for a chance to win a hundred. Plus fifty boxes of chocolates. The cruel part—watching two guys hitting each other, maybe hurting each other, while they’re safe in the bleachers.”

“His father was mean with the lamps and only kept one up in front for the road ahead, so Meshak hated being out on the highway at night. He was afraid of the dark. It was not just the spirit world which frightened him, but the real world of robbers and highwaymen, especially near the forest.”

A rich and almost gothic drama unfolds, full of dastardly villains, cold hearted aristocrats, devoted friends and passionate lovers, and set against a background of cruelty, music, murder and the neglect of children. The story sweeps along with great exuberance.

“Otis Gardiner, pots man, Jack-of-all-trades and smooth tongued entrepreneur, ranted non-stop. It was side of Otis that not everyone saw; he could be so attractive, so charming, so sweetly spoken. A young man still, he had wide, appealing, brown eyes and shoulder-length

“No, I could not be cruel, and yet I must often do what looks cruel to those who do not know. But the people they say I drown, I only carry away to the back of the north wind - only I never saw the place.”

A sad, sweet tale of a lonely girl (I don’t remember them mentioning her age, but I’d guess eleven or so) in an orphanage. Although the story is set in Germany in the early 1950s, it could come from just about any time or place.

“Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain.”

“Life had already dealt her some cruel surprises, and the present surprise had yet to reveal its nature, cruel or otherwise.”

“In a place far distant from where you are now grows an oak-tree by a lake. Round the oak’s trunk is a chain of golden links. Tethered to the chain is a learned cat, and this most learned of all cats walks round and round the tree continually.”

Out of the frozen wastes she studied the words and runes that would give her power to understand the messages of the ghost drum. At last she heard Safa’s cries.

It is an original fairy tale using elements from Russian history and Russian folklore. Like many traditional tales it is full of cruelty, violence and sudden death.

“Cruel blows of fate call for extreme kindness in the family circle.”

“Serenity, danger, and cruelty are all present in Mo’s account. The preface provides brief historical context about the Spanish Civil War and the anti-fascist Basque rebels who fought against Franco’s dictatorship after the war.”

″ ‘And now, Tom, my boy,’ said the Squire, ‘remember you are going, at your own earnest request, to be chucked into this great school, like a young bear, with all your troubles before you -earlier than we should have sent you perhaps. If schools are what they were in my time, you’ll see a great many cruel blackguard things done, and hear a deal of foul, bad talk. But never fear. You tell the truth, keep a brave and kind heart, and never listen to or say anything you wouldn’t have your mother and sister hear, and you’ll never feel ashamed to come home, or we to see you.’ ”

“Be a bad dog, and I’ll whale the stuffin’ outa you.”

“Do you think that he saw anything worse than he might see tonight upon the plains of Manchuria, where men march out with a jeweled image of him before them, to do wholesale murder for the benefit of foul monsters of sensuality and cruelty?

I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband, who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, avarice, brutality, and meanness. And I had heard of the death of her husband, from an accident consequent on his ill-treatment of a horse. This release had befallen her some two years before; for anything I knew, she was married again.

“Mr. Heathcliff, you’re a cruel man, but you’re not a fiend; and you won’t, from mere malice, destroy irrevocably all my happiness.”

“As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.”

“There are good thoughtful men like our master, that any horse may be proud to serve; and there are bad, cruel men, who never ought to have a horse or dog to call their own.”

″...and by giving way to such passion you injure your own character as much, nay more, than you injure your horse;”

Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody’s business to interfere when they see it;

“My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”

“I did once, but it’s no use; men are strongest, and if they are cruel and have no feeling, there is nothing that we can do, but just bear it--bear it on and on to the end.”