Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution; justice without mercy is cruelty.

I think cruelty is just loneliness disguised as bitterness.

The only people you have to look out for in life are the people that don’t care about anything or anyone. These are the people that end up teaching your children.

I sometimes think that animals are incapable of the kinds of cruelty that humans willingly inflict on each other.

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?

For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.

Nevertheless, in this sea of human wretchedness and malice there bloomed at times compassion, as a pale flower blooms in a putrid marsh.

unkindness �of ravens”?

So, that was Nature’s way. The mosquito felt pain and panic but the dragonfly knew nothing of cruelty. Humans would call it evil, the big dragonfly destroying the mosquito and ignoring the little insects suffering....

In all Thénardier’s outpourings, the words and gestures, the fury blazing in his eyes, this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado and abjectness, arrogance, pettiness, rage, absurdity; the hodgepodge of...

He’s been through so much and to watch that boy suffer makes me wish this world wasn’t so cruel.

Don’t fool yourself: we all have a cruel streak. We keep it under lock and key either because we’re afraid of getting punished or because we believe this will somehow make a difference, make the...

En toda guerra el odio da lugar a más odio, la crueldad es correspondida con más crueldad y llega un momento en el que es difícil decir cuándo empezó la vorágine del «ojo por ojo»,...

Where was my guardian angel when I needed him most? If only I knew.

I saw exactly one picture of Marx and one of Lenin in my whole stay, but it’s been a long time since ideology had anything to do with it. Not without cunning, Fat Man and...

Man is the cruelest animal,” says Zarathustra. “When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights, crucifixations he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on Earth. And when he invented Hell…lo, Hell was his Heaven on...

A suffering or tortured animal always filled her with such a surge of sympathy that it lifted her clean out of herself.

Lust, anger, attachment, greed, over pride be,Jealousy, selfishness, injustice, cruelty, ego truly;- 153 –

What was it about us, as humans, that drove us to make apologies for beautiful things?

I am not cruel —only truthful.

Cruel’, O’Kelly laughed, ‘it’s cruel to tell children the truth. If anything convinces me of God’s mercy, then it’s his gift of making us unable to lie.

Cruel people offer pity when they no longer feel threatened. However, kind people offer compassion and understanding regardless.

Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without impact. Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

To insult someone we call him ‘bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‘human’ might be the greater insult.

People talk sometimes of ‘bestial’ cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beast; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically, so artfully cruel.

But all this was beside the point. What scared Amy was the mere fact of what looked inescapably like recreational malevolence. The poem had been written by an adult, not some teen with an unfinished...

Twas such a useless thing. And so unnecessary. Many had suffered for the actions of a few. Wasn’t that always the way of things? The collective suffered for the actions of an inept, ineffectual leader.

Denna is a wild thing,” I explained. “Like a hind or a summer storm. If a storm blows down your house, or breaks a tree, you don’t say the storm was mean. It was cruel....

April is the cruelest month, breedinglilacs out of the dead land, mixingmemory and desire, stirringdull roots with spring rain.

There are no coincidences in life. What person that wandered in and out of your life was there for some purpose, even if they caused you harm. Sometimes, it doesn’t make sense the short periods...

We are stronger than stigma, but until more celebrity role models openly discuss mental illness we will still be stereotyped as less than capable, by an upside down world that thinks reality television is actually...

And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to do another and harder...

The modeling world – and the world at large – is a pretty cruel place. It’s up to you to decide whether or not that turns you into a cruel person as well. Are you...

Ordinary men wonder why those of only average intelligence so often rise to the highest levels of power, while highly intelligent people generally do not. They fail to understand that reaching the highest levels of...

I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one...

It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.

Emotion without reason lets people walk all over you; reason without emotion is a mask for cruelty.

In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is...

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.

Guilt is a lazy feeling that takes no action; the wings of integrity are the only thing that sets it free.

You always fashioned yourself as the Empire’s harshest Fist, didn’t you, Korbolo Dom? As if cruelty’s a virtue…

Killing a cruelty is not a cruelty.

It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel...

The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness – and love. Books loved anyone who...

Tom watched with his arms folded as the life that had been within Kobe died out, and the fire continued.

(…) ograniczenie umysłowe i okrucieństwo ludzkie nie zna granic.

Subjugation requires vigilance; if you relax your brutality even for a moment, the people you’re oppressing will revolt at the first sign of weakness. That’s why dictatorial regimes are always a slippery slope of cruelty...

All cruelty springs from weakness.

Never love someone beneath your level of evolution. If you want a monkey, you can visit one at your local zoo.

Be leery of silence. It doesn’t mean you won the argument. Often, people are just busy reloading their guns.