Cruelty Quotes - Page 33

• I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.

  Edward Albee

  Kindness, Independent, I Have Learned

  1958 The Zoo Story.

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• We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing that we do. There are many crimes which are the creation of man himself, the wrongfulness of which is put down to their divergence from habit, custom, or tradition. But cruelty is not of these. It is a fundamental sin, and admits of no argument or nice distinctions. If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, its protest against cruelty is always clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us - in fact, anyone who does not join in is dubbed a crank.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Karma, Nice, Heart

  "The Complete Works of Rabindranath Tagore".

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• People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? 'Natural' death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful.

  George Orwell

  Life, Death, War

  George Orwell (2009). “Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays”, p.238, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

  Quentin Crisp

  Love, Running, Brave

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• Hanging is too good for him said Mr. Cruelty.

  John Bunyan

  Punishment, Said

  The Pilgrim's Progress pt. 1 (1678)

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• The most important thing in my life, and the thing I try to focus on, is to try not to live a life of cruelty. That means trying to make sure I look people in the eye when I meet them. Sometimes you jump in a taxi, or maybe you only have two minutes with someone, and you never see them again. I try to always look them in the eye and have a real experience of what it is to communicate with someone.

  Jessica Chastain

  Real, Grateful, Mean

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Although I can't stop all cruelty to living creatures on the planet, I can be kinder to every living creature in my life.

  River Phoenix

  Planets, Creatures, Kinder

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• Cruelty to children is the thing I can least bear in the world.

  Juliet Stevenson

  Children, World, Bears

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• What people need to understand is, that if they are eating animals, they are promoting cruelty to animals.

  Pamela Anderson

  Animal, People, Needs

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• There are certain pictures I can never take. We turn on the TV and are smothered with cruelty and suffering and I don't need to add to it. So I just photograph peaceful things. A vase of flowers, a beautiful girl. Sometimes, through a peaceful face, I can bring something important into the world.

  Edouard Boubat

  Beautiful, Girl, Flower

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• If you are not the victim, don't examine it entirely from your point of view because when YOU'RE not the victim, it becomes pretty easy to rationalize and excuse cruelty, injustice, inequality, slavery, and even murder. But when you're the victim, things look a lot differently from that angle.

  Gary Yourofsky

  Views, Looks, Slavery

  Speech to the students of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Summer 2010.

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• Life happened. In all its banality, brutality, cruelty, unfairness. But also in its beauty, pleasures and delights. Life happened.

  Thrity Umrigar

  Brutality, Delight, Life Happens

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• The food we eat masks so much cruelty. The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, how capitalism has colonized our minds. The fact that we look no further than the commodity itself, the fact that we refuse to understand the relationships that underly the commodities that we use on a daily basis. And so food is like that.

  Angela Davis

  Country, Thinking, Mind

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• Leaving traces of ourselves, as in creative productivity, could then be seen as part of the definition of consciousness for us as well. We know that in order to progress we must stretch for something just out of reach--if only for a life that will be more compassionate and decent than the cruelty, paranoia, greed, narrow corporatism, or narcissism we mostly indulge in and find such ample justification for. And so we dream.

  Breyten Breytenbach

  Dream, Order, Indulge In

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• Savor kindness because cruelty is always possible later.

  Jenny Holzer

  Kindness

  Jenny Holzer, Stefan Banz, Thomas Whitridge, Béatrix Ruf (2001). “Jenny Holzer: xenon”

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• I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Life, Pain, Compassion

  1820 Prometheus Unbound, act 1, l.303-5.

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• The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Beautiful, Eye, Dark

  Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “The Tombs of Atuan: The Second Book of Earthsea”, p.53, Hachette UK

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• Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.

  Zadie Smith

  Energy, World, Misplaced

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• It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.

  Thomas Paine

  Men, Belief, Murder

  Thomas Paine (2011). “The Age of Reason”, p.119, Broadview Press

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• Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Tribes, Injustice, Sin

  Robert A. Heinlein (2007). “Glory Road”, p.144, Macmillan

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• Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Animal, Vegetarianism, Justice

  "Animal life in Jewish tradition: attitudes and relationships". Book by Elijah Judah Schochet, p. 297, 1984.

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• Well used are those cruelties (if it is permitted to speak well of evil) that are carried out in a single stroke, done out of necessity to protect oneself, and are not continued but are instead converted into the greatest possible benefits for the subjects. Badly used are those cruelties which. although being few at the outset, grow with the passing time instead of disappearing. Those who follow the first method can remedy their condition with God and with men; the others cannot possibly survive.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Men, Evil, Done

  Niccolo Machiavelli (1979). “The Portable Machiavelli”, p.75, Penguin

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• The mystery of life--its inexplicability, beauty, cruelty, tenderness, folly . . . has occupied the greater part of my waking thoughts; and in reverence or rage or irony, as the moment or situation might dictate, I have pondered and even demanded of cosmic energy to know Why.

  Theodore Dreiser

  Energy, Might, Waking

  Theodore Dreiser (1977). “Theodore Dreiser: a selection of uncollected prose”, Wayne State Univ Pr

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• For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness.

  Alain Badiou

  Hands, Order, Enemy

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• If you hit a Talib, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty. You must fight others through peace and through dialogue and through education.

  Malala Yousafzai

  Fighting, Differences, Would Be

  "How Malala, Teen Activist Shot By Taliban, Made Jon Stewart’s Jaw Drop" by Eleanor Goldberg, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 9, 2013.

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