cruelty

All animals understand love and affection, but only man shows the propensity to place himself into the shoes of another life form

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 power has nothing to do with admired attributes such as intelligence and competence. The predominant characteristic of those who rise to the highest levels of power is a total disregard for the consequences _ including death _ that will befall thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of human beings if it is deemed necessary to attain his (or her) goals. Generally speaking, it is this total disregard for humanity that has distinguished __ulers_ throughout history.

Cruelty is easy, cheap and rampant.

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 thick dreams that we are capable of nothing cruel.

There is no redemption in a cruel man's love.

in every pleasure, cruelty has its place...

Sometimes it's a revelation, even to me, how much more comfortable I am with cruelty than with kindness.

The only thing crueler than a cage sosmall that a bird can__ fly is a cage solarge that a bird thinks it can fly.

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 baseness.

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 ...

Something caught in her throat at this second thanks, when she'd threatened him so brutally. When you're a monster, she thought, you are thanked and praised for not behaving like a monster. She would like to restrain from cruelty and receive no admiration for it.

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.

The only thing worse than cruelty is delegated cruelty.

_did it make a difference if the remark never got back to the person about whom it was made? She thought not. The harm is done when the words are uttered: that is the act of belittlement, the act of diminishing the other, and it is that act which would cause pain to the victim. You said that about me? The wrong was located in the making of the cruel remark, rather than in the pain it might later cause.

I wish something would happen to me, something that would show me exactly how cruel and jealous and vengeful I can be. Then I could go back to gentleness because I chose it over brutality for its own sake, not because I didn't have the courage to be cruel. I might even like cruelty. I doubt very much that I would, but I ought to find out.

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 normal behavior.

My mother always says that indifference is the greatest cruelty.

Of all mankind's unpleasant habits, sheer and willful cruelty is the most base, the least forgivable and, when carried to its extreme, perhaps the most horrific.