Quotes about cruelty

And even if what they showed you is true, that doesn’t begin to make it right. The cause might be just, Felka, but history’s littered with atrocities committed in the name of righteousness.

Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all this seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of an individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands too. Collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who warned: 'Once lead this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.

A man hunted only for food or clothing or in self-defense. It was another mark of the effete and the sadistic to take life as a sport.

Children who have felt cruelty know very well how to inflict it.

War has its own laws and one of the oldest and most persistent is that those who have surrendered and civilians, where possible, should be spared. Yet we all know the stories or have seen pictures of the sacking of cities, the execution of prisoners of war, the shelling of churches filled with refugees, or the farm buildings deliberately set on fire, and we remember names such as Oradour or Wounded Knee or Nanjing. For any American who lived through the Vietnam War the incident at My Lai, when a representative group of ordinary American soldiers rampaged through a village, has come to represent the barbarism of much of that war. (The Vietnamese forces committed their own atrocities, but Vietnam has been slow to come to terms with them.) In 1968 American reporters in the country started to hear stories about the murder in cold blood of some 500 villagers, of all ages, by an American patrol. One courageous helicopter pilot who was there did his best to save the Vietnamese and later filed a report with his superiors, who did nothing.

Justice. I remember justice. It had a pleasant taste. Justice was what we were about when Beric led us, or so we told ourselves. We were king’s men, knights, and heroes... but some knights are dark and full of terrors, my lady. War makes monsters of us all.

It is better to be seen as cruel than foolish.

Cruel lands breed cruel peoples.

Only the creatures of the earth take from one another, boy. All creatures, but men more than any. Life they take, and liberty, and all that another man may have—sometimes through greed, sometimes through stupidity, but never by any volition but their own. Beware your own race, Bran Davies—they are the only ones who will ever harm you, in the end.

No one would listen to me when I tried to protest that foxhunting was cruel. And as a young boy it was hard to argue with my elders about being disrespectful, but it seemed to me that if you didn't want foxes to get into your henhouse, then you needed to build an enclosure that was foxproof. It seemed totally unjust to set foxhounds to kill foxes because human beings were too lazy to take proper care of their chickens. Whenever I tried to speak to anyone about it, I was told to mind my manners, what did I know? I was just a child. It was years before I was vindicated and foxhunting was banned in England and Wales. During the debate that raged beforehand, I was involved in researching the effect hunting had on the fox. The prohunting lobby said that they only caught old and sick animals, but that was simply not true. I examined foxes that had been caught and among them were carcasses of eighteen-month-old foxes - animals in the prime of life - too young to know how to save themselves. Another myth was that the lead dog brought down the fox and it was all over in seconds with a single bite. The truth was they ran the fox to exhaustion until its brain boiled and swelled, its lungs bled, and the fox drowned in its own blood. They were often dead before the hounds even touched them. It was the most horrific death.

'Is it he?' quoth one, 'Is this the man?'

By him who died on the cross,

With his cruel bow he laid full low

The harmless Albatross

I remember a tutor who told me that all the world's hunters have eyes that faced front: lions, hawks, wolves, men ... He said man was no different from the tiger. We are nature's killers, and we have great appetites for it ... Listen, Rayvan, the beast is in all of us. We do our best in life, but often we are mean, or petty, or needlessly cruel. We don't mean to be, but that's the way we are.