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?
It is cruelty to be humane to rebels, and humanity is cruelty.
Cruelty might be very human and very cultural, but it is not acceptable and it is not an option.
Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.
Cruelty is a tyrant that's always attended with fear.
There is something going on now in Mexico that I happen to think is cruelty to animals. What I'm talking about, of course, is cat juggling.
It's a terrible cruelty of predatory capitalism: both parents now have to work. A family has to have two incomes in order to buy the things that are desirable in our culture. So the degradation of motherhood - the sense that motherhood isn't itself a calling - also arises from economic pressure.
The matter of the abuse and cruelty we inflict on other animals has to fight for our attention in what sometimes seems an already overfull moral agenda. It is vital, however, that these instances of injustice not be overlooked.
Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
That slow poison [slavery] is daily contaminating the minds and morals of our people. Every gentlemen here is born a petty tyrant, practiced in acts of despotism and cruelty.
Freedom is never granted. It is earned by each generation. . . in the face of tyranny, cruelty, oppression, extremism, sometimes there is only one choice. When the world looks to America, America looks to you, and you never let her down.
She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.
I see the way I look upon organized religion, I was a victim of that of mythology, and of cruelty, and all the absurd stuff.
Decisiveness is often the art of timely cruelty.
Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.
Laws can be wrong and laws can be cruel. And the people who live only by the law are both wrong and cruel.
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.
Cruelty is the only sin.
The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.
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.