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

Abortion should be listed as a weapon of mass destruction against the voiceless.

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

My Ten Commandments:1. God is a verb, not a noun.2. Prayers are important only if they lead to corresponding actions.3. Creation is an art. Science provides the tools for the artist. Anybody with the tools...

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...

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.

I’d known cruelty in a school—cruelty that would keep these amateurs up all night. But this kind of scene—crowds batting around a person because they thought he was weak—happened to be my personal trigger.

A wife who obsesses on “fixing” her husband only succeeds in demeaning him.pg 48

In my experience, when a woman’s cruelty is combined with love and devotion, it is almost always without exception an act performed not out of treachery, but as a painful self-sacrifice for the good of...

I coudn’t be kind to him after what he’d done, couldn’t be cruel after what I had done

Never stand in the way of letting God use people’s actions, in order to solve a greater issue in the world.

To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It’s never at such times that we...

Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.

Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men...

today we read of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, it isalmost an ordeal, which would make us seem very strange and incomprehensibleto the author and his contemporaries, – they read it...

No, we aren’t civilized, even in our business suits and high heels. People are as mean as ever, and as predictable. Underneath it all, we are not so different from what lurks in the wild,...

She understood now that while it had been wrong to kill Cansrel, it had also been right. The boy with the strange eyes had helped her to see the rightness of it. The boy who’d...

The bust of Colonel Sanders stands as a monument to cruelty and has no place in the Kentucky state Capitol.

All classes in proportion to their lack of travel and familiarity with foreign literature are bellicose, prejudiced against foreigners, fond of fighting as a cruel sport — in short, dog-like in their notions of foreign...

Not one word was said by Moses or Aaron as to the wickedness of depriving a human being of his liberty. Not a word was said in favor of liberty. Not the slightest intimation that...

Defensiveness is usually someone silently screaming that they need you to value and respect them in disguise. When you look for deeper meanings behind someone’s pain you can then begin to heal not only yourself,...