cruelty

It is my sincere desire that my research and hard work will help create a world where we all learn to walk this Earth, safe, enlightened and free from the perils of cruelty, ignorance, and all the other dark and sinister forces, which make assholes possible.

It's not cruelty, maybe, but a desire to understand that motivates them.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

There is a certain beauty in our intrinsic human cruelty.

...perhaps great sins start as simple weakness, and the consistent placing of self before others.

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

The reality is that in many countries torture of the most revolting cruelty happens routinely, often under the auspices of governments with good relations with Europe and the United States, sometimes using equipment knowingly supplied by Western companies. There is little reason to think torture is in retreat. The festival of cruelty is in full swing.

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.

[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

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.

A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was.

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

The number of your antagonists are far more greater than that of your companions, so you have to keep a stone of awareness to mark the boundary line.

She dared to cry? On this day of all days? I was the one who would be married at sunset, and I hadn't let myself cry in five years. There was ice in my lungs and in my heart. I was floating. I was swept away, and out of the cold I spoke to her in a voice as soft as snow, the gentle and obedient voice I had used to consent to every order that Father and Aunt Telomache ever gave me, every order that they would never give Astraia because they actually loved her."You know, that Rhyme is a lie that Aunt Telomache only told you because you weren't strong enough to bear the truth."I had thought the words so often, they felt like nothing in my mouth, like no more than a breath of air, and as easily as breathing I went on."The truth is, Mother died because of you, and now I have to die for your sake, too. And neither one of us will ever forgive you."Then I shoved her aside and strode out of the room.

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 moments such as these no road through a wood, no stretch of shore, that can bring me comfort. The beauty of these things can no longer at such moments make up to me at all for the ugliness of man, his cruelty, his greed, his lying face.

I'd believed mine was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies, the creation of hope. I thought hope could overcome everything, but I was wrong. Hope cannot overcome truth. Hope and truth cannot co-exist. Truth destroys hope. The most savage cruelties man inflicts on man are committed in the pursuit of truth. My last lie had been the most honest, the most honorable of them all, for there is an art greater even than the creation of hope. The greatest art of all is the destruction of truth.

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 Earth"; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world.

All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities--even merely with the velvet.