Quotes about cruelty

It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.

You were born with compassion, only that also means that when people are cruel to you it cuts you deep. You won't understand that you have to walk right up to the ones who are being hateful and laugh in their faces and earn their respect. Instead you'll try to figure out what you did to make them mad at you.

The people had fled at our approach, except for an old woman too feeble to move... We burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo cigarette lighters... [because] Ho Chi Minh had said the people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam... We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable.

The Jehovah or Yahweh of the Old Testament seems to me to be a sadistic, bloodthirsty, genocidal villain.

Alec, do you believe in your heart that your God caused bears to tear up little children merely because they made fun of an old man's bald head?

Despite all evidence to the contrary I do not believe humans innately cruel, but they fear change of any kind.

It’s not religious fervor; it’s just a mean, very cruel streak.

Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself — a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.

Brutality breeds brutality. Love breeds love.

People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.

What mean and cruel things men can do for the love of God.

Men are always the same. Fear makes them cruel.