Cruelty Quotes - Page 37

• Once admit that we have the right to inflict unnecessary suffering and you destroy the very basis of human society.

  John Galsworthy

  Animal, Compassion, Suffering

  John Galsworthy (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of John Galsworthy (Illustrated)”, p.7260, Delphi Classics

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• In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.

  Maurice Sendak

  Children, Crazy, Anger

  "'Wild Things' author isn't wild about Hollywood" by Jake Coyle, www.today.com. October 13, 2009.

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• I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We're all cruel, aren't we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that's what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with. I hope the overall view isn't just that though, or I've failed in my writing. There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That's where the real art lies.

  Martin McDonagh

  Art, Real, Drama

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

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• Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.

  Noah Richler

  People, Imagination, Alive

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• Life has shown me all too often that there is no rhyme or reason to the cruelty inflicted upon humanity.

  Cassia Leo

  Humanity, Reason, Rhyme

  Cassia Leo (2014). “Black Box”, p.17, Random House

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• Since you walked out on me I'm getting lovelier by the hour. I glow like a corpse in the dark. No one sees how round and sharp my eyes have grown how my carcass looks like a glass urn, how I hold up things in the rags of my hands, the way I can stand through crippled by lust. No, there's just your cruelty circling my head like a bright rotting halo.

  Nina Cassian

  Broken Heart, Eye, Dark

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• The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.

  William Carlos Williams

  Broken Heart, Love Is, Together

  William Carlos Williams (1967). “Pictures from Brueghel, and Other Poems: Collected Poems, 1950-1962”, p.125, New Directions Publishing

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• The civilised cultures are the most cruel. It's the same with education - often it breeds sadistic forms of cruelty.

  Nellie McKay

  Culture, Sadistic, Form

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• One line typed twenty years ago
  can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
  to glorify art as detachment
  or torture of those we
  did not love but also
  did not want to kill.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Wall, Years

  Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.27, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
  Cruelly, being barren.
  Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

  Sylvia Plath

  Moon, Light, Radiance

  Sylvia Plath (2010). “Ariel”, p.18, Faber & Faber

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• Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime--and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.

  Sigmund Freud

  Plato, Believe, Book

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• Love is not ful of pittie (as men say)
  But deaffe and cruell, where he meanes to pray.

  Christopher Marlowe

  Love, Men, Praying

  Christopher Marlowe (1981). “The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe: Edward II. Doctor Faustus. The first book of Lucan. Ovid's Elegies. Hero and Leander. Miscellaneous poems”

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• I think if you're against cruelty and you look at what happens to animals in slaughterhouses and on factory farms, you have to be completely against eating meat.

  Ingrid Newkirk

  Animal, Thinking, Meat

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• Fortified plant-based milks are delicious and contain all the calcium, protein, and vitamin D of dairy products but with none of the cholesterol, lactose, hormones, or cruelty found in cow's milk.

  Ingrid Newkirk

  Cows, Vitamin D, Vitamins

  "The ‘Real Milk’ Campaign Hopes To Make Real Suckers Out Of Us" by Ingrid Newkirk, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 1, 2012.

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• Today, I marvel at the vegan foods in the supermarket, at the cruelty-free clothing choices in stores, and at the fantastic alternatives to dissection in schools, the modern ways to test medicines without killing rabbits and beagles, the many forms of entertainment involving purely human performers.

  Ingrid Newkirk

  School, Medicine, Choices

  "Every Week There is More Reason to Feel Empathy for Animals" by Ingrid Newkirk, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 17, 2009.

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• As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one's friends' and relatives' children.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Funny, Children, Mercy

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• As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.

  Steven Pinker

  Philosophy, Believe, Exercise

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• Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

  Marcel Proust

  Knowing, Enchantment, Firsts

  Marcel Proust, Christopher Prendergast (2002). “In Search of Lost Time: Sodom and Gomorrah”

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• In recent years, we have seen the United States back away from pressuring the Castro regime, under the misguided view that placating them with an open hand would yield progress. That naivete has invited only more cruelty and oppression in return.

  Mitt Romney

  Yield, Views, Hands

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• Cruelty is not a literary value.

  Salman Rushdie

  Values

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• Animal rights activists talk about cruelty and torture, some backing their assertions by publishing out-of-date photographs of "experiments" banned long ago. This is a misrepresentation. The work we do is performed with compassion, care, humanity and humility. I have never seen an animal suffer pain.

  Robert Winston

  Pain, Humility, Animal

  "The shame of our silence" by Robert Winston, www.theguardian.com. May 30, 2006.

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• In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We’re each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real. We’ve got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there is a lot of grey to work with. No one can live in the light all the time.

  Libba Bray

  Art, Pain, Regret

  Libba Bray (2010). “A Great and Terrible Beauty”, p.249, Simon and Schuster

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• I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them.

  Philip Pullman

  Ignorance, Thinking, Sight

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• People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence.

  Philip Pullman

  Kindness, Book, People

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• Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.

  Victor Hugo

  Wisdom, Flower, Suffering

  Victor Hugo (2008). “Ninety-Three: A Historical Novel”, p.295, Mondial

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