Ruthless Quotes - Page 3

To be ruthless requires belief that our life on earth is but a brief prelude to an afterlife, or a temporary sacrifice before some utopia can be instituted.
Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.

Eric Hoffer

Moving, Sacrifice, Skills

1955 The Passionate State of Mind.

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Absolute discretion is a ruthless master. It is more destructive of freedom than any of man's other inventions.

William O. Douglas

Men, Invention, Masters

"United States v. Wunderlich, 342 U.S. 98". U.S. Supreme Court case, supreme.justia.com. November 26, 1951.

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Spirituality can go hand-in-hand with ruthless single-mindedness when the individual is convinced his cause is just

Michela Wrong

Hands, Causes, Spirituality

Michela Wrong (2000). “In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo”, Fourth Estate

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Let there be no mistake, Hamas is a ruthless terrorist organization.

Lois Capps

Mistake, Organization, Terrorist

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One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be.

John Berryman

Writing

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Don't ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit.

Linus Torvalds

Mistake, Thinking, Errors

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Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the various creatures as straw dogs; the sage is ruthless, and treats others as straw dogs.

Laozi

Dog, Heaven, Sage

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Nothing weighs more heavily on age than time. Nothing has more meaning Now time becomes, with a kind of ruthless honesty, what it has always been: life's most precious commodity. The only difference is that, finally, we know it.

Joan D. Chittister

Time, Honesty, Differences

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Modern Darwinism makes it abundantly clear that many less ruthless traits, some not always admired by robber barons and Fuhrers - altruism, general intelligence, compassion - may be the key to survival.

Carl Sagan

Life, Compassion, Keys

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Because one species is more clever than another, does it give it the right to imprison or torture the less clever species? Does one exceptionally clever individual have a right to exploit the less clever individuals of his own species? To say that he does is to say with the Fascists that the strong have a right to abuse and exploit the weak - might is right, and the strong and ruthless shall inherit the earth.

Richard D. Ryder

Strong, Clever, Philosophical

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Those who are in love with the present can be cruel and corrupt but not genuinely vicious. They cannot be methodically and consistently ruthless.

Eric Hoffer

Religion, Vicious, Consistently

Eric Hoffer (1996). “The Passionate State of Mind”

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Heaven's blessing must attend all, and freedom must soon be given to the pining millions under a ruthless bondage.

Frederick Douglass

Freedom, Blessing, Heaven

Frederick Douglass (1855). “My Bondage and My Freedom ...”, p.360

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The misfortunes which God is represented in the book of Job as allowing Satan to inflict on Job, merely to test his faith, are indications, if not of positive malevolence, at least of a suspicious and ruthless insecurity, which is characteristic more of a tyrant than of a wholly powerful and benevolent deity.

A.J. Ayer

God, Religious, Jobs

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I've been chased through airports with a screaming baby because the photographers are ruthless, and they want the picture.

Lisa Marie Presley

Baby, Airports, Want

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'Dallas' hit a chord back in the late Seventies and Eighties because it was the age of greed: here you have this unapologetic character who is mean and nasty and ruthless and does it all with an evil grin. I think people related to JR back then because we all have someone we know exactly like him. Everyone in the world knows a JR.

Larry Hagman

Character, Mean, Thinking

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There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that's not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it's whatever leads to reproductive success.

Steven Pinker

Mean, Competition, Survival

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Love has no thought of self!
Love buys not with the ruthless usurer's gold
The loathsome prostitution of a hand
Without a heart! Love sacrifices all things
To bless the thing it loves!

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Life, Heart, Sacrifice

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O neglectful Nature, wherefore art thou thus partial, becoming to some of thy children a tender and benignant mother, to others a most cruel and ruthless stepmother? I see thy children given into slavery to others without ever receiving any benefit, and in lieu of any reward for the services they have done for them they are repaid by the severest punishments.

Leonardo da Vinci

Mother, Art, Nature

Leonardo (da Vinci) (1906). “Note Books: Arranged and Rendered Into English, with Introd”

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The problem with capitalism is that it best rewards the worst part of us: the ruthless, competitive, conniving, opportunistic, acquisitive drives, giving little reward and often much punishment-or at least much handicap-to honesty, compassion, fair play, many forms of hard work, love of justice, and a concern for those in need.

Michael Parenti

Honesty, Hard Work, Compassion

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You can't be anything but who you are. I wouldn't love you the same if you stopped being you. How do I change enough to accept that ruthless streak in you.

Christine Feehan

Love You, Enough, Accepting

Christine Feehan (2012). “Christine Feehan's Drake Sisters Series: Five Novels and a Novella”, p.510, Penguin

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People, you see... are ruthless and foolish. When they're young, in order to have money and power, they give up everything like health and youth. And when they get sick, become old, and have all the money and power... in order to find their health and youth again, they spend all of the wealth they've wasted so much energy and time to accumulate.

Jae Hee

Giving Up, Drama, Order

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Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.

Woodrow Wilson

War, Fighting, Men

Woodrow Wilson (2015). “Wilson, Volume V: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 1916-1917”, p.399, Princeton University Press

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As I have already urged, the practice of that which is ethically best - what we call goodness or virtue - involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless selfassertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect , but shall help his fellows. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence. Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic process.

Thomas Huxley

Struggle, Science, Self

"Evolution And Ethics".

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If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.

Henry A. Kissinger

Peace, War, Patriotic

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Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days.

J. K. Rowling

Writing, Mushrooms, Long

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