Ruthlessness Quotes

• Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

  Aldous Huxley

  Children, Curiosity, Vision

  Aldous Huxley (2000). “Complete Essays: 1930-1935”, Ivan R Dee

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• Perhaps this war will pass like the others which divided us leaving us dead, killing us along with the killers but the shame of this time puts its burning fingers to our faces. Who will erase the ruthlessness hidden in innocent blood?

  Pablo Neruda

  Time, War, Blood

  Pablo Neruda (1975). “Pablo Neruda: selected poems”

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• This is a ruthless world and one must be ruthless to cope with it.

  Charlie Chaplin

  Wicked World, World, Ruthless

  "Fictional character: Henri Verdoux". "Monsieur Verdoux", 1947.

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• Success always necessitates a degree of ruthlessness. Given the choice of friendship or success, I'd probably choose success.

  Sting

  Friendship, Choices, Degrees

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• To save our imperiled honor everything must be sacrificed, even virtue.

  Jean Racine

  Honor, Virtue

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• When it is established that government by right can take wealth from some and give it to others. When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law, men will use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they have passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket.

  Ayn Rand

  Believe, Winning, Men

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• Simplicity requires ruthlessness.

  Tim Ferriss

  Simplicity

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• No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Men, Bombs, Kitten

  The Great Arsenal of Democracy, delivered 29 December 1940

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• You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.

  Nelson Algren

  Writing, Blow, Creative

  "Nonconformity: Writing on Writing". Book by Nelson Algren, 1996.

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• People who think of themselves as tough-minded and realistic, among them influential political leaders and businessmen as well as go-getters and hustlers of smaller caliber, tend to take it for granted that human nature is selfish and that life is a struggle in which only the fittest may survive. According to this philosophy, the basic law by which man must live, in spite of his surface veneer of civilization, is the law of the jungle. The "fittest" are those who can bring to the struggle superior force, superior cunning, and superior ruthlessness.

  S. I. Hayakawa

  Philosophy, Selfish, Struggle

  "Language in Thought and Action". Book by S. I. Hayakawa (p. 8), 1949.

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• Henri-Georges Clouzot's cool, clammy, twisty 1955 thriller Diabolique is an almost perfect movie about a very nearly perfect murder, a film in which the artist's methods and the killers' are ideally matched, equal in cunning and in ruthlessness. The screenplay, adapted by Clouzot and three other writers from a novel by the crack French crime-fiction team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, is a fantastically elaborate piece of contrivance, but the scrupulous realism of the direction makes the unnatural tale somehow feel entirely likely.

  Terrence Rafferty

  Team, Artist, Almost Perfect

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• We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.

  Jack Gilbert

  Acceptance, World, Stubbornness

  Jack Gilbert (2009). “Refusing Heaven”, p.3, Knopf

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• Economics dominates politics - and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.

  Chris Hedges

  Different, Economics, Form

  Chris Hedges (2010). “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”, p.146, Nation Books

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• What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction.

  Francis Galton

  Nature, Kindness, Lying

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• Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.

  William Shakespeare

  Fall, Eye, Tears

  William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, George Steevens (1813). “The Plays of William Shakespeare: In Twenty-one Volumes, with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators, to which are Added Notes”, p.437

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• What is evil? What is - where does the evil come from that lies behind someone like Saddam Hussein, or Radovan Karadzic, or General Claude Raymond in Haiti. As I say, I've tended to find these people - I mean, Saddam, I've never met or interviewed - but these other people to be rather disappointing. Their political goals were mundane. What they had working for them was opportunism, was very often cleverness and was ruthlessness.

  Mark Danner

  Lying, Mean, Goal

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• A materialistic person is ruthless with other people but kind to himself. A spiritual person is ruthless with himself but kind to everybody else.

  Jaggi Vasudev

  Spiritual, People, Humanity

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• The true lesson of the Vietnam War is: certainty of purpose and ruthlessness of execution win wars.

  Ronald Reagan

  Peace, War, Winning

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• I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Imagination, Lag, Way

  "Capitalism has learned to create host organisms". www.theguardian.com. October 18, 2011.

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• War is simple, direct, and ruthless.

  George S. Patton

  War, Simple, Direct

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• Like one of those fake-smart, middlebrow TV shows, the speciousness of The Social Network is disguised by topicality. It's really a movie excusing Hollywood ruthlessness.

  Armond White

  Smart, Tv Shows, Fake

  "Social Network keeps its 100%, Armond White trolls by not trolling" by Vince Mancini, uproxx.com. September 29, 2010.

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• There is an efficiency inspired by love which goes far beyond and is much greater than the efficiency of ambition; and without love, which brings an integrated understanding of life, efficiency breeds ruthlessness.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  War, Ambition, Understanding

  "Education and the Significance of Life".

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• In both cases, weakness and scruples had defeated strength and ruthlessness.

  Ken Follett

  Weakness, Defeated, Scruples

  Ken Follett (2011). “Ken Follett EPIC HISTORICAL COLLECTION”, p.1448, Penguin

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• Jim and I hit it off immediately, partly because our interests were astonishingly similar and partly, I suspect, because a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness, an impatience with sloppy thinking can naturally to both of us.

  Francis Crick

  Science, Thinking, Arrogance

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• There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgement. When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom- freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement

  Eric Hoffer

  Lying, Hate, Men

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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