Do not build a castle around one act of kindness; do not build an empire around one act of cruelty.

Did you really cease to love a person because you had been treated cruelly?

Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man’s cruelty and...

And the answer is: You are wrong. The Faeries are not gone. But they are no longer what they were. I watched it and did not help them, though I could have. I cheered. I...

…so much attention is paid to the aggressive sins, such as violence and cruelty, and greed with all their tragic effects, that too little attention is paid to the passive sins, such as apathy and...

In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invisible, we have a daily darkness that is night, and we encounter another darkness from time...

She wasn’t a cruel Bird. But her heart ached so badly for these sad, broken birds that, just as the Puppeteer had planned, she had begun to hate them. She hated them for making her...

Sometimes you can be so deeply wrapped up in a person that the only way to deal with it is to use cruelty to push them away.

For Mercy has a human heart;Pity, a human face;And Love, the human form divine:And Peace the human dress.Songs of InnocenceCruelty has a human heartAnd jealousy a human face,Terror the human form divine,And secrecy the human...

When I speak of God, I mean that god who prevented man from putting forth his hand and taking also of the fruit of the tree of life that he might live forever; of that...

For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like...

It would be both foolish and cumbersome to continue our everyday existences in bliss without first denying to ourselves, for the sake of excusing our own repugnance, the inherent cruelty from which modern civilization was...

It is impossible for me to be an Anarchist, for I do not believe in the essential goodness of man. The world, the physical world, that was once all in all to me, has at...

But I’ve still better things about children. I’ve collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, ‘most worthy and...

There is no brutality and cruelty in battles and wars; in reality only the outcome matters.

We can never be gods, after all–but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.

Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.–Blanche Dubois

Despite our disapproval with what God allows us to endure, he still remains the same God that is not interested in our convenience, as much as our character.

Lack of communication has a way of clipping our wings, which keeps us from flying. When things are left unspoken, we forget that everyone is destined to share the sky together.

If there is a deity of the kind imagined by votaries of the big mail-order religions such as Christianity and Islam, and if this deity is the creator of all things, then it is responsible...

I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.

I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as...

Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

I meant that the hatred of that July day in Nashville was alive and well on that horrible day in Pittsburgh. People hate others so they strike like snakes. It’s all connected—we’re all connected, bumping...

There goes the girl with the wings,” they say. “The damned dreamer with her eyes shut to the world.””There goes the misguided soul with her heart buried in the ground.”They taunt. They lie. They lie....

Eastward and westward storms are breaking,–great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable.

Cruelty is a part of nature, at least of human nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us.

You may marry Miss Grey for her fifteen pounds but you will always be my Willoughby. My nightmare. My sorrow. My past. My mistake. My regret. My love.

True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee...

Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.

Torture when inflicted on childrenbecomes indefensible. Even among those who believe that torture is a defensiblepractice to extract information, the case for inflicting pain and abuse upon childrenproves impossible to support.

There is within me a knot of cruelty borne by the stream of love, much as our blood sometimes bears the seed of our destruction …

. . . have not some religions, including the most influential forms of Christianity, taught that the heart of man is totally corrupt? How could the course of religion in its entire sweep not be...

Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is… we cannot expect things to be much better in this world… We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any...

A few years ago the Deists denied the inspiration of the Bible on account of its cruelty. At the same time they worshiped what they were pleased to call the God of Nature. Now we...

Until you have stood in another woman’s stilettos, you will never begin to know the year of pain she felt breaking them in.

I close my eyes, knowing that afterward we will fall asleep together on our small mattress, as we do every night, listening to the wind in the palm trees outside our window, believing in our...

One time I took my knife and sliced off the end of a hog’s nose, just like a piece of salami. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it sat there looking kind...

Our historical pastime is the direct satisfaction of inflicting pain. There are lines in Nekrassov describing how a peasant lashes a horse on the eyes, ‘on its meek eyes,’ everyone must have seen it. It’s...

He’s probably divorced. Mental cruelty.

They saw me. Milton’s smile curled off his face like unsticky tape. And I knew immediately, I was a boy band, a boondoggle, born fool. He was going to pull a Danny Zuko in Grease...

in every pleasure, cruelty has its place…

Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.

You will face your greatest opposition when you are closest to your biggest miracle.

True monsters are not those lurking under the bed, but the ones sleeping in it.

In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other’s blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven’s love.

Goodness, real goodness, has it’s own sort of cruelty to it.

Treblinka – 100% human stereate.” Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is this?Yet I’m not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only...