Cruelty

Cruelty can be described as indifference to suffering, and even positive pleasure in inflicting it. Sadism can also be related to this form of action or concept.

• Man's inhumanity to man
  Makes countless thousands mourn!
  • Robert Burns, Man Was Made to Mourn (1786).

• Detested sport,
  That owes its pleasures to another's pain.
  • William Cowper, The Task (1785), Book III, line 326.

• He who seeks his own happiness by inflicting pain on others, being entangled by bonds of enmity, cannot be free from enmity.
  • Dhammapada Verse 251

• It is the law of life that if you are kind to someone you feel happy. If you are cruel you are unhappy. And if you hurt someone, you will be hurt back.
  • Cary Grant, as quoted in "Love – That’s All Cary Grant Ever Thinks About" by Sheilah Graham Westbrook in Motion Picture (June 1964).

• The pain was maddening. You should pray to God when you're dying, if you can pray when you're in agony. In my dream I didn't pray to God, I thought of Roger and how dearly I loved him. The pain of those wicked flames was not half so bad as the pain I felt when I knew he was dead. I felt suddenly glad to be dying. I didn't know when you were burnt to death you'd bleed. I thought the blood would all dry up in the terrible heat. But I was bleeding heavily. The blood was dripping and hissing in the flames. I wished I had enough blood to put the flames out. The worst part was my eyes. I hate the thought of gong blind. It's bad enough when I'm awake but in dreams you can't shake the thoughts away. They remain. In this dream I was going blind. I tried to close my eyelids but I couldn't. They must have been burnt off, and now those flames were going to pluck my eyes out with their evil fingers, I didn't want to go blind. The flames weren't so cruel after all. They began to feel cold. Icy cold. It occurred to me that I wasn't burning to death but freezing to death.
  • Arthur Guirdham in The Cathars and Reincarnation, p. 89.

• Maybe God isn't the sex police, Richard. Sometimes I think Christians get all hung up on the sex thing because it's easier to worry about sex than to ask yourself, am I a good person? […] It makes it easy to be cruel, because as long as you're not fucking around, nothing you do can be that bad. Is that really all you think of God?
  • Anita Blake, to Richard Zeeman
  • Laurell K. Hamilton (June 2007). "chapter 44". The Harlequin (1st edition ed.). Berkley Books. pp. pp. 391-392. ISBN 978-0-425-21724-5. 

• It is not linen you're wearing out,
  But human creatures' lives.
  • Thomas Hood, Song of the Shirt (1843).

• Even bear-baiting was esteemed heathenish and unchristian: the sport of it, not the inhumanity, gave offence.
  • David Hume, The History of England, (1754-62), Volume I, Chapter LXII.

• 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, The Black Jacobins (1938), p. 88

• People try to excuse their brutality by saying that it is the custom; but a crime does not cease to be a crime because many commit it. Karma takes no account of custom; and the karma of cruelty is the most terrible of all. In India at least there can be no excuse for such customs, for the duty of harmlessness is well-known to all. The fate of the cruel must fall also upon all who go out intentionally to kill God's creatures, and call it "sport".
  • Jiddu Krishnamurti, At the Feet of the Master (1911)

• Cruel lands breed cruel peoples
  • Maester Luwin, in George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings, Ch. Bran (VI)

• The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
  • Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, History of England (1849-1861), Volume I, Chapter II.

• If we are to end our wars, we have to dispense with a threatening, vengeful, bloodthirsty God. If we're to have any kind of world brotherhood, we have to dispense with a God who reserves his favors for a chosen few. Life is given to all. The sun shines freely on each of us. Would a God be less kindly? More than this, we must also dispense with our species God, and extend our ideas of divinity outward to the rest of nature which couches us and our religious theorizing with such a gracious and steady support.
  • Jane Roberts in The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto, p. 63.

• I must be cruel, only to be kind.
  • William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600-02), Act III, scene 4, line 198.

• Men so noble,
  However faulty, yet should find respect
  For what they have been; 'tis a cruelty
  To load a falling man.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry VIII (c. 1613), Act V, scene 3, line 74.

• See what a rent the envious Casca made.
  • William Shakespeare, Julius Cæsar (1599), Act III, scene 2, line 179.

• You are the cruell'st she alive,
  If you will lead these graces to the grave
  And leave the world no copy.
  • William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (c. 1601-02), Act I, scene 5, line 259.

• If ever henceforth thou
  These rural latches to his entrance open,
  Or hoop his body more with thy embraces,
  I will devise a death as cruel for thee
  As thou art tender to't.
  • William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale (c. 1610-11), Act IV, scene 4, line 448.

• There is little more destructive than the passive bystander allowing cruelty to be freely imposed.
  • Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2016. ISBN 9781551526447. 

• I can only imagine the envy with which Donald watched Derek Chauvin's casual cruelty and monstrous indifference as he murdered George Floyd; hands in his pockets, his insouciant gaze aimed at the camera. I can only imagine that Donald wishes it had been his knee on Floyd's neck.
  • Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (2020), p. 210

• Franco's cruelty was that of the centurion, impersonal and efficient. Once, inspecting troops as a colonel of the Spanish Foreign Legion, he had food thrown in his face by a legionnaire protesting its quality. It spattered his uniform, but his facial expression did not change, nor did he say a word. He merely took out his handkerchief, wiped off the food and continued the inspection. Returning to his office, he calmly called an officer, pointed out the offender and said:
  "Take that soldier out and execute him."
  • Alden Whitman, (November 20, 1975)"Franco Is Dead in Madrid at 82". The New York Times.

• Sadism is plainly connected with the need for self-assertion. At the same time it cannot be separated from the idea of defeat. A sadist is a man, who, in some sense, has his back to the wall. Nothing is further from sadism, for example, than the cheerful, optimistic mentality of a Shaw or Wells.
  • Colin Wilson in The Origins of the Sexual Impulse, p. 158.

• Inhumanity is caught from man,
  From smiling man.
  • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night V, line 158.

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 152-53.

• Contre les rebelles c'est cruauté que d'estre humain, et humanité d'estre cruel.
  • It is cruelty to be humane to rebels, and humanity is cruelty.
  • Attributed to Charles IX; according to M. Fournier, an expression taken from a sermon of Corneille Muis, Bishop of Bitoute. Used by Catherine De Medicis.

• An angel with a trumpet said,
  "Forever more, forever more,
  The reign of violence is o'er!"
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Occultation of Orion, Stanza 6.

• Je voudrais bien voir la grimace qu'il fait à cette heure sur cet échafaud.
  • I would love to see the grimace he [Marquis de Cinq-Mars] is now making on the scaffold.
  • Louis XIII; see Histoire de Louis XIII, IV, p. 416.

• Gaudensque viam fecisse ruina.
  • He rejoices to have made his way by ruin.
  • Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, Pharsalia, I. 150.

• Cruelty to animals
• Egotism
• Inhumanity
• Kindness
• Mercy
• Oppression
• Torture