Cruelty Quotes - Page 24

• In every home in America, in the world, there was cruelty, anger and hatred - things I didn't feel.

  Frederick Lenz

  Home, America, Hatred

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• He doesn't have super powers or the biggest, baddest gun. The point isn't how many people you can kill or how you kill them. He is there to fight piracy, greed, and cruelty in all their forms on land and sea

  Billy Zane

  Fighting, Gun, Sea

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• The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.

  Henry Adams

  Men, Ideas, Atheism

  Benjamin Franklin, Ulysses S Grant, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Adams (2016). “Great American Lives: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, and The Education of Henry Adams”, p.1519, Open Road Media

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• The reader may ask himself if this is not cruelty and injustice of a kind so terrible that it beggars the imagination, and whether these poor people would not fare far better if they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the New World who masquerade as Christians.

  Bartolome de las Casas

  Christian, Hands, Imagination

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• Parsons always seem to be specially horrified about things like sunbathing and naked bodies. They don't mind poverty and misery and cruelty to animals nearly as much.

  Susan Ertz

  Animal, Mind, Atheism

  Susan Ertz (1931). “The Story of Julian”, New York D. Appleton 1931.

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• During the ages of faith the Church argued, not illogically, that any degree of cruelty towards sinners and heretics was justified, if there was a chance that it could save them, or others, from the eternal torments of hell. Thus, in the name of the religion of love, hundreds of thousands of people were not merely killed but atrociously tortured in ways that made the gas chambers of Beslen seem humane.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Names, People, Atheism

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• Human cruelty took the form of a pact with the deity. A solemn oath was made to kill everything, in which people forbade themselves any display of reason or compassion. A city or a land was devoted to destruction and it was believed an insult to God if one did not observe the abominable oath.

  Ernest Renan

  Compassion, Land, Cities

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• The cruelty of a Fijian god, who, represented as devouring the souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture during the process, is small compared with the cruelty of a God who condemns men to tortures which are eternal.

  Herbert Spencer

  Men, Soul, Atheism

  Herbert Spencer (1920). “The Principles of Sociology”

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• What! I should call on that Infinite Love that has served us so well? Infinite cruelty rather, that made everlasting hell, Made us, foreknew us, foredoom'd us, and does what he will with his own; Better our dead brute mother who never has heard us groan.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Mother, Atheism, Doe

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Illustrated)”, p.1373, Delphi Classics

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• You know how to paint pleasure, cruelty, arrogance in glowing colors.

  Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

  Glowing, Color, Arrogance

  Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (2015). “Venus in Furs”, p.57, Cosimo Classics

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• Hearing the sound of your breathing as you sleep,
  with the dog at your feet, his head resting
  on a shoe, and the clock's ticking
  like water dripping in a sink - I know that, even if reincarnation were a fact,
  given the inherent cruelty of the world
  where beautiful things and people
  are blasted apart all the day long,
  I would never want to come back, knowing
  I could never be this lucky twice.

  Bruce Dawe

  Beautiful, Dog, Sleep

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• So, that was Nature's way. The mosquito felt pain and panic but the dragonfly knew nothing of cruelty. Humans would call it evil, the big dragonfly destroying the mosquito and ignoring the little insects suffering. Yet humans hated mosquitoes too, calling them vicious and bloodthirsty. All these words, words like 'evil' and 'vicious', they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.

  John Marsden

  Pain, Evil, Suffering

  John Marsden (2011). “The Tomorrow Series: Tomorrow When the War Began”, p.153, Hachette UK

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• Cruelty to animals is an enormous injustice; so is expecting those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder to do the dangerous, soul-numbing work of slaughtering sentient beings on our behalf.

  Victoria Moran

  Animal, Soul, Ladders

  Victoria Moran, Adair Moran (2012). “Main Street Vegan: Everything You Need to Know to Eat Healthfully and Live Compassionately in the Real World”, p.14, Penguin

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• No woman kills herself for love, and rarely for shame. It is the cruelty of hope that does a woman in; for no matter how many men a woman has given herself to, she never holds her life cheap until she foolishly believed it to be valued.

  Sheri Holman

  Men, Doe, Matter

  Sheri Holman (2010). “The Dress Lodger”, p.234, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Here is the paradox of the thing we call freedom: the farther we wander from God and the more we try to break free from him, the more enchained we become. Every step we take away from Him leads us farther from the freedom of Jesus and closer to the cruelty of Cain.

  Steven James

  Jesus, Trying, Cain

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• The whole famous Reign of Terror [of the 1790s] in fifteen months guillotined 2,596 aristos. The Versaillists [the anti-Communards of 1871] executed 20,000 before their firing squads in one week. Do these figures represent the comparative efficiency of guillotine and modern rifle or the comparative cruelty of upper and lower class mobs?

  Guy Endore

  Squad, Class, Rifles

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• How can a good God appoint cruel people to positions of authority? The answer is simple: God is the originator of the authority, but He is not the author of the cruelty. Man is responsible for his cruel actions, not God. All authority is of God, but not all authority is godly.

  John Bevere

  Godly, Simple, Men

  John Bevere (2007). “Honor's Reward: How to Attract God's Favor and Blessing”, p.51, Messenger International

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• Love is not a consequence. Love is not a choice. Love is a thirst. A need as vital to the soul as water is to the body. Love is a precious draught that not only soothes a parched throat, but it vitalizes a man. It fortifies him enough that he is willing to slay dragons for the woman who offers it. Take that draught of love from me and I will shrivel to dust. To take it from a man dying of thirst and give it to another whilst he watches is a cruelty I never thought you capable of.

  Colleen Houck

  Love Is, Men, Dragons

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• In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll's Essays and Lectures. This was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit.

  Charlie Chaplin

  Discovery, Philadelphia, Atheism

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• What is it the Bible teaches us? -- rapine, cruelty, and murder.

  Thomas Paine

  Murder, Founding Fathers Religion, Founding Fathers Atheist

  Thomas Paine (1995). “Thomas Paine: Collected Writings: Common Sense / The American Crisis / Rights of: (Library of America #76)”, p.822, Library of America

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• A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was.

  Don Cupitt

  People, Arrogance, Would Be

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• Religion, politics, society are exploiting you, and you are being conditioned by them; you are being forced in a particular direction. You are not human beings; you are mere cogs in a machine.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Suffering, Cogs, Machines

  "The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti".

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• To Forget Venice is a tour de force of ventriloquism. Elegant, contemporary, and wry, the voice at its center is also capable of disarming flights of imagination as it enters and inhabits other lives across time and gender. The glittering, fetid city emerges as a complex metaphor for the human heart’s simultaneous tenderness and capacity for cruelty, its ‘silver glow / a local specialty: filth / disguised as ornament.’ This Venice is unforgettable.

  Chase Twichell

  Heart, Venice, Cities

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• People routinely assume that pornography is such a difficult and divisive issue because it's about sex. In fact, this culture struggles unsuccessfully with pornography because it is about men's cruelty to women, and the pleasure men sometimes take in that cruelty. And that is much more difficult for people-- men and women-- to face.

  Robert Jensen

  Sex, Struggle, Men

  Robert Jensen (2007). “Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity”

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• It is my sincere opinion that our precious time on earth should not be spent attempting to justify unbelievable acts of cruelty, death, and disease as a part of 'God’s Plan' or the greater good — and clinging to ancient texts that preach ill-concealed bigotry and sexism. Instead, we should find ways to make this life happy and satisfying, without regard to the unknowable nature of an afterlife.

  David G. McAfee

  Happy Life, Afterlife, Time On Earth

  FaceBook post by David G. McAfee from Mar 22, 2014

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