Cruelty Quotes

My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred.

Albert Einstein

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists - That is why they invented hell.

Bertrand Russell

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (1950), "Outline of Intellectual Rubbish".

All cruelty springs from weakness.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others.

Marquis de Sade

The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.

Joseph Conrad

When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.

William Shakespeare, Henry V

What is it the Bible teaches us? - Rapine, cruelty, and murder. What is it the Testament teaches us? - To believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.

Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

Cruelty is like hope: it springs eternal.

Dr. Anthony Daniels, The Observer (1998)

Hypocrisy, the lie, is the true sister of evil, intolerance, and cruelty.

Raisa M. Gorbachev

My loathings are simple stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Vladimir Nabokov

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Vladimir Nabokov

The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn.

Pope John Paul II