Top 141 Cruelty Quotes

I’ve always hoped ‘Chopped’ would telegraph our enormous affection and love and admiration for chefs and food, but at the same time, we are inflicting extraordinary cruelty on them.

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?

I don’t inflict horrors on readers. In my research, I’ve uncovered truly terrible documentations of cruelty and torture, but I leave that offstage. I always pull back and let the reader imagine the details. We all know to one degree or another the horrors of war.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

When it comes to environmental regulation, the cruelty is the point.

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.

I had these experiences as a kid; I remember certain things happening in school that were horrifying that I would see, certain things of violence or certain things of cruelty, but around that, something might happen afterwards to cause everyone to laugh, and that always blew me away.

Cruelty is all out of ignorance. If you knew what was in store for you, you wouldn’t hurt anybody, because whatever you do comes back much more forceful than you send it out.

Labour parades compassion for the poor, but it practised casual cruelty by consigning millions to benefits. Yet there’s nothing compassionate about being trapped on benefits, being robbed of the dignity of work, and shut out from the choices that brings.

I’ve always been fascinated by accounts of seemingly ‘normal’ people who have committed horrendous acts of cruelty and violence. You hear it on the news all the time.

War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle.

Even so, one step from my grave, I believe that cruelty, spite, The powers of darkness will in time, Be crushed by the spirit of light.

When I was a teenager, I used to love the Bronte books, ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Jane Eyre.’ In those books, the women do usually manage to heal the men, but in life, I’ve found it’s often the woman gets wounded. Instead of healing a man, she gets affected by his cruelty.

Fantasy novels give this illusion that the stakes are as high as they feel when you’re a teenager. But I think for teenagers they actually are that high. I think you really are dealing in a world of tremendous cruelty and intensity, and YA gives truth to that.

Cruelty to men and to the lower animals as well, which would have passed unnoticed a century ago, now shocks the sensibilities and is regarded as wicked and degrading.

Since we can’t count on the meat, egg, and dairy industries to protect animals from the most egregious forms of cruelty, what can we, as consumers, do? Opting out of paying someone to allow animals to die in a barn fire or at the slaughterhouse seems pretty reasonable.

I have a mean streak and I am capable of cruelty. This does not mean that I am necessarily mean and cruel; instead, it means that I have to be vigilant about my capacity for cruelty and the mean bone in my body.

The thing which grieves and oppresses my heart with respect to poor Scotland, is the hardness of heart manifest in the levity and cruelty with which they speak of others.

I think he is an extremely accessible character. In Data there is no potential for cruelty.

I lived in the Republic of Ireland. I wrote a book about the North but as an outsider. The hatreds there were not mine. I never felt them. I liked how open in most ways Catalan nationalism was, compared to Irish nationalism. I disliked the violence and cruelty in Ireland.

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.

Sadly, of course, there is real evil in the world. You watch the news, and you see all of the people suffering and so much cruelty.

Girlhood is often marred by schoolgirl cruelty, a grim rite of passage in which parents sometimes cruelly collude. Mothers and fathers must take a stand against petty or protracted hostility between girls.

No man-made law will ever eliminate cruelty and evil from every human heart.

Animal rights activists talk about cruelty and torture, some backing their assertions by publishing out-of-date photographs of ‘experiments’ banned long ago. This is a misrepresentation. The work we do is performed with compassion, care, humanity and humility. I have never seen an animal suffer pain.

All cruelty springs from weakness.

You couldn’t enclose people in institutions or hospitals or almshouses in the way the Victorians managed to do. India was too big. Seeing the suffering people was terrible, but I think I was more distraught at the needless cruelty to so many animals.

People talk about fantastic memories of childhood, but I remember children being cruel to me and wanting to come out of childhood as soon as possible because I knew adults were generally more contained in their cruelty.

All of us in society are supposed to believe that cruelty to animals is wrong and that it is a good thing to prevent needless suffering. So if that is true, how can meat be acceptable under any but the most extraordinary circumstances, such as perhaps roasting the bird who died flying into a window?

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.

Rather than dull our consciences to the unmitigated violence of abortion, the passage of time has only enabled us to see and, frankly, better understand the innate cruelty of abortion and its horrific legacy – victims – while making us more determined than ever to protect the weakest and the most vulnerable.

In the real world, as lived and experienced by real people, the demand for human rights and dignity, the longing for liberty and justice and opportunity, the hatred of oppression and corruption and cruelty is reality.

I think the suffering, violence and cruelty and Guantanamo and the rest is going to go on and on in Iraq.

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

The terrorists are fighting freedom with all their cunning and cruelty because freedom is their greatest fear – and they should be afraid, because freedom is on the march.

I see that the path of progress has never taken a straight line, but has always been a zigzag course amid the conflicting forces of right and wrong, truth and error, justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy.

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.

Cruelty is not a literary value.

If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There’s also the environmental argument for it.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

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

The only thing that really depresses me is animal cruelty.

When I first saw a picture of the crucifixion, I lost respect for my parents. I suddenly realised that this is what the adult world is like – full of cruelty and hypocrisy.

You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.

I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.

Let us be honest with each other. The threat to marriage is not the gays. It is a lack of loving commitment – whether it is found in the form of neglect, indifference, cruelty or adultery, to name just a few manifestations of the loveless desert in which too many marriages come to grief.

If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

I am very sad for men and women trapped in any relationship where there is cruelty, dominance, inequity. I long for the liberation of all people.

I just came home and said, ‘I’m a vegetarian.’ My parents were very kind about it. And then, I became a vegan a year or two after that. Animal cruelty really got to me.