73 Cruelty Quotes To Reflect

Cruelty, in its many forms, has long been a subject of contemplation and commentary. From the sharp words of famous authors to the profound insights of philosophers, reflections on cruelty reveal the darker aspects of human nature and the world around us. In this collection, we bring together 73 poignant quotes that will make you pause and consider the impact of cruelty, both in historical contexts and in our everyday lives. These quotes serve not only as a mirror of past and present but also as a call to action for a kinder future. Join us on this reflective journey and explore the depths of the human experience through the lens of powerful words.

1. “He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.” - Emmanuel Kant

2. “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.” - Tom Stoppard

3. “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 condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people.” - Ruth Harrison

4. “[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.” - Bertrand Russell

5. “April is the cruelest month, breedinglilacs out of the dead land, mixingmemory and desire, stirringdull roots with spring rain.” - T.S. Eliot

6. “It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.” - Thomas Paine

7. “True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.” - Yukio Mishima

8. “Man is the cruelest animal.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

9. “Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.--Blanche Dubois” - Tennessee Williams's

10. “All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.” - Zora Neale Hurston

11. “All cruelty springs from weakness.” - seneca

12. “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 of morality.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

13. “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.” - Tennessee Williams

14. “I must be cruel only to be kind;Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.” - William Shakespeare

15. “In a cruel land, you either learned to laugh at cruelty or spent your life weeping.” - Robert Jordan

16. “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. It acted according to its nature and something unfortunately was hurt. The same is true of Denna.” - Patrick Rothfuss

17. “But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.” - Carson McCullers

18. “We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.” - N.K. Jemisin

19. “If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals.Can we tell a new story?” - Jonathan Safran Foer

20. “I don't believe in the concept of hell, but if I did I would think of it as filled with people who were cruel to animals.” - Gary Larson

21. “It was woman that taught me cruelty, and on woman therefore I have exercised it.” - Walter Scott

22. “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.” - Yevgeny Zamyatin

23. “I remember an hypothesis argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, 'Whether supposing that the flavour of a big who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremem) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting an animal to death?' I forget the decision.” - Charles Lamb

24. “Now, your Honor, I have spoken about the war. I believed in it. I don’t know whether I was crazy or not. Sometimes I think perhaps I was. I approved of it; I joined in the general cry of madness and despair. I urged men to fight. I was safe because I was too old to go. I was like the rest. What did they do? Right or wrong, justifiable or unjustifiable -- which I need not discuss today -- it changed the world. For four long years the civilized world was engaged in killing men. Christian against Christian, barbarian uniting with Christians to kill Christians; anything to kill. It was taught in every school, aye in the Sunday schools. The little children played at war. The toddling children on the street. Do you suppose this world has ever been the same since? How long, your Honor, will it take for the world to get back the humane emotions that were slowly growing before the war? How long will it take the calloused hearts of men before the scars of hatred and cruelty shall be removed?We read of killing one hundred thousand men in a day. We read about it and we rejoiced in it -- if it was the other fellows who were killed. We were fed on flesh and drank blood. Even down to the prattling babe. I need not tell you how many upright, honorable young boys have come into this court charged with murder, some saved and some sent to their death, boys who fought in this war and learned to place a cheap value on human life. You know it and I know it. These boys were brought up in it. The tales of death were in their homes, their playgrounds, their schools; they were in the newspapers that they read; it was a part of the common frenzy -- what was a life? It was nothing. It was the least sacred thing in existence and these boys were trained to this cruelty.” - Clarence Darrow

25. “I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing; It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.” - Lorrie Moore

26. “You have the effrontery to be squeamish, it thought at him. But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape – the great face pressed even closer, so that Wonse was staring into the pitiless depths of his eyes – we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.” - Terry Pratchett

27. “Mitleid mit den Thieren hängt mit der Güte des Charakters so genau zusammen, daß man zuversichtlich behaupten darf, wer gegen Thiere grausam ist, könne kein guter Mensch seyn.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

28. “(...) ograniczenie umysłowe i okrucieństwo ludzkie nie zna granic.” - Olga Tokarczuk

29. “Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.” - Oscar Wilde

30. “We are cruel enough without meaning to be.” - John Updike

31. “It was the first time I saw the look on the face of the people I robbed: it was ugly. I was the cause of such ugliness, and the only thing that made me feel was a cruel pleasure which, I thought, was bound to transfigure my own face, to make me resplendent. I was then 23 years old. From that moment on, I felt capable of advancing in cruelty.” - Jean Genet

32. “Do you understand what I'm saying?"shouted Moist. "You can't just go around killing people!""Why Not? You Do." The golem lowered his arm."What?" snapped Moist. "I do not! Who told you that?""I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People," said the golem calmly."I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!""No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.” - Terry Pratchett

33. “Killing animals to make a fashion statement = a sickening + cold-blooded vanity.” - Jess C. Scott

34. “Cruelty and fear shake hands together. An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.” - Honoré de Balzac

35. “Anger, resentment and jealousy doesn't change the heart of others-- it only changes yours.” - Shannon Alder

36. “Man of an hard heart! Hear me, Proud, Stern, and Cruel! You could have saved me; you could have restored me to happiness and virtue, but would not! You are the destroyer of my Soul; You are my Murderer, and on you fall the curse of my death and my unborn Infant’s! Insolent in your yet-unshaken virtue, you disdained the prayers of a Penitent; But God will show mercy, though you show none. And where is the merit of your boasted virtue? What temptations have you vanquished? Coward! you have fled from it, not opposed seduction. But the day of Trial will arrive! Oh! then when you yield to impetuous passions! when you feel that Man is weak, and born to err; When shuddering you look back upon your crimes, and solicit with terror the mercy of your God, Oh! in that fearful moment think upon me! Think upon your Cruelty! Think upon Agnes, and despair of pardon!” - Matthew Gregory Lewis

37. “A monster. You and your friends, all of you. Pretty monsters. It's a stage all girls go through. If you're lucky you get through it without doing any permanent damage to yourself or anyone else.” - Kelly Link

38. “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.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

39. “Emotion without reason lets people walk all over you; reason without emotion is a mask for cruelty.” - Nalini Singh

40. “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 single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.” - Haruki Murakami

41. “Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.” - Thomas Hardy

42. “There will always be someone willing to hurt you, put you down, gossip about you, belittle your accomplishments and judge your soul. It is a fact that we all must face. However, if you realize that God is a best friend that stands beside you when others cast stones you will never be afraid, never feel worthless and never feel alone.” - Shannon Alder

43. “We prayed these wars would end all wars --In war we know is no romance."(Done With Bonaparte)” - Mark Knopfler

44. “There are always two people involved in cruelty, aren't there? One to be vicious and someone to suffer! And what's the use of getting rid of - of wickedness, say - in the outside world if you let it creep back into things from inside you?” - Margaret Mahy

45. “Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls.- On Religion” - Arthur Schopenhauer

46. “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 and better one.” - C.S. Lewis (The Horse and His Boy)

47. “Tom watched with his arms folded as the life that had been within Kobe died out, and the fire continued.” - Keisha Keenleyside

48. “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 policy."[Quoted in Socialism and Foreign Policy and War and the Liberal Conscience]” - George Bernard Shaw

49. “...here's what I've learned - people will hurt you, but you don't have to respond - not every mean comment or cruel act deserves to be noticed ...” - John Geddes

50. “It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace with another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us.” - J.M. Coetzee

51. “People often speak of hell, not wanting to go there, avoiding it..etc. I never had that problem because hell is a state of mind. Look around you; rape, murder, wars, hatred, envy...my friend; you're already there!!” - Sandra Chami Kassis

52. “Since my arrival in Rome, I have had many opportunities to wonder if compassion’s opposite is cruelty, or to reflect whether or not indifference would serve as a better black to its white.” - Andrew Levkoff

53. “He's been through so much and to watch that boy suffer makes me wish this world wasn't so cruel.” - Shannon A Thompson

54. “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 ...” - James Hurst

55. “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.” - Aberjhani

56. “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 accept the idea without a second thought.” - C.J. Sansom

57. “Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the 'last days' before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they took as certain proof that the Apocalypse was imminent. Again like fundamentalists today, they looked on the prospect of the violent destruction of mankind without turning a hair. The remarkable similarity between the first Tudor Puritans and the fanatics among today's Christian fundamentalists extends to their selective reading of the Bible, their emphasis on the Book of Revelation, their certainty of their rightness, even to their phraseology. Where the Book of Revelation is concerned, I share the view of Guy, that the early church fathers released something very dangerous on the world when, after much deliberation, they decided to include it in the Christian canon."[From the author's concluding Historical Note]” - C.J. Sansom

58. “That's not cruel. This is. You come here in the middle of the night, expecting me to be awake, and ask—no, demand—me to give you things that belong to me as much as they belong to you. Never mind what it does to me. Never mind that each time I see you, I wonder if I'll ever hold you in my arms again, or be able to touch you without you cringing away like I'm a monster. I think it's fair to ask if there's an 'us,' my dear, because I suspect you're trying to use me just now. Tell me that's not cruel, and I'll let you go.” - Nenia Campbell

59. “It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world.” - John Fowles

60. “the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us...” - Barack Obama

61. “I think cruelty is just loneliness disguised as bitterness.” - Tom Hiddleston

62. “I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.” - George Saunders

63. “Jack laughed behind him, a mirthless sound from a man who had been on the wrong end of life's ironies too many times.” - R.D. Ronald

64. “All animals understand love and affection, but only man shows the propensity to place himself into the shoes of another life form” - The Cruxshadows

65. “Cruelty is a language that the blind can see, the deaf can hear, and the heart feels forever.” - Shannon L. Alder

66. “...perhaps great sins start as simple weakness, and the consistent placing of self before others.” - Anne Perry

67. “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 feel so wretched, when she should be happiest. That happens sometimes.” - Katherine Catmull

68. “I sometimes think that animals are incapable of the kinds of cruelty that humans willingly inflict on each other.” - Belinda Jeffrey

69. “Inhumanity is the keynote of stupidity in power.” - Alexander Berkman

70. “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 around into each other, some of us good, some bad, most a mixture. Every thought acted upon has consequences. Every one.” - Laura Anderson Kurk

71. “Grayson noticed me next to the lockers. He pointed at me then held his arms out magnanimously. “You’re welcome, new girl,” he said. “I just saved you from having to find a nice way to say no to the leg dragger.” - Laura Anderson Kurk

72. “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.” - Laura Anderson Kurk

73. “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.” - Maya Banks