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Quotes About Cruelties

We must not repeat the same mistakes, or commit the same cruelties that were done in the past.
~ Jacky Rosen
In the past, Britons were scathing about the cruelties of the old Roman empire and the excesses of Catholic empire builders such as the Spanish and the French. They convinced themselves that their empire was different and benign because it rested on sea power and trade rather than on armies.
~ Linda Colley
Look beyond your tasseled caps And you will see injustice. At the end of your fingertips You will find cruelties, Irrational hate, bedrock sorrow And terrifying loneliness. There is your work.
~ Maya Angelou
Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
~ Susan Sontag
Throughout the world today there are people who are enduring cruelties and persecution because of their Christian faith. We must pray for them, and for ourselves, so that in our own dying hour God will give us grace to endure until the end, anticipating the certainty of His glory to come.
~ Billy Graham
But a soldier ought not to dwell too long on such matters. His life is full of hardship and he must take his pleasure where he can. Though he may take time to reflect upon the cruelties that he sees, place him among his comrades and it is almost impossible for his spirits not to rise. Strange
~ Susanna Clarke
This house, he told them at last, is disordered and dirty. Its inhabitants have idled away their days in pointless pleasures and in celebrations of past cruelties - things that ought not to be remembered, let alone celebrated. I have often observed it and often regretted it. All these faults, I shall in time set right.
~ Susanna Clarke
The kingdom of Winter is a diamond-crusted study of beautiful cruelties, lovely and inimically dangerous, for each alluring facet contains a hidden weapon or terror. It's brutally cold—we ice where we stand—so I adjust our body temperatures by erecting a slice of warmer climate around us, and ice sloughs off us in great, melting sheets.
~ Karen Marie Moning
that single embodiment of a world crippled by its legacy of recent cruelties and a self-lacerating worship of the proceeds of selfishness and greed.
~ Iain Banks
Western intellectual enthusiasm for Communism tended to peak not in times of 'goulash Communism' or 'Socialism with a human face', but rather at the moments of the regime's worst cruelties: 1935–39 and 1944–56. Writers, professors, artists, teachers and journalists frequently admired Stalin not in spite of his faults, but because of them. It was when he was murdering people on an industrial scale
~ Tony Judt
She turned towards me, put her fingertips against my chest. She was enjoying it somewhat, too, the little betrayal of Mark's memory. She still loved him, differently; now and again there must be these retrospective cruelties, to consolidate her newness, to let her not love him in the old way.
~ Glen Duncan
Royal joined the singing to change the subject and to remind her that there were things a body could feel good about. A community that had come together, from seeding to harvest to the bee. But the song was a work song Cora knew from the cotton rows, drawing her back to the Randall cruelties and making her heart thud. Connelly used to start the song as a signal to go back to picking after a whipping. how could such a bitter thing become a means of pleasure?
~ Colson Whitehead
He had grown up in a home without love, filled with petty cruelties and alcoholism and despair, a place where dreams of a better life were absurd and worthy of venomous critique from his own father.
~ Greg Bottoms
The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race, have had their origin in this thing called revelation or revealed religion.
~ Thomas Paine
you can't make these unilateral pacts with life. You can't say: that's it, my emotions are securely locked away, now I'm impregnable, safe from the world's cruelties and disappointments. Better to take them on, come what may, I said, see what strength you have within you.
~ William Boyd
Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.
~ Hermann Hesse
I just need to be able to vanquish my enemies. That's all." He looks surprised, "Do you have a lot of enemies, then?" I am sure he imagines me among the children of the Gentry, with their soft hands and velvet skirts. He thinks of little cruelties, small slights, minor snubs. "Not many," I say, thinking of the lazy, hateful look Cardan gave me by torchlight in the hedge maze. "But they're quality.
~ Holly Black
Faeries make up for their inability to lie with a panoply of deceptions and cruelties.
~ Holly Black
With the advent of this something-not-known (which he scarcely dares consider lest it vanish), the metastasizing animosities among the witness bearers are dissolving, as if the Dancing were sealing their acceptance of all woebegone humankind in all its greed and cruelties as the only creature capable of evil and the only one - surely those two are connected - aware that it must die.
~ Peter Matthiessen
He showed me things I had never seen, cruelties and horrors all committed in the name of the Authority, all designed to destroy the joys and the truthfulness of life.
~ Philip Pullman
All our progress of luxury and knowledge . . . we have not been lifted by as much as an inch above the level of the darkest ages . . . The last hundred years have wrought no change in the passions, the cruelties, and the barbarous impulses of mankind. There is no change from the savagery of the Middle Ages. We enter a new century equipped with every wonderful device of science and art but the pirate, the savage, and the tyrant still survives.
~ Jim Harrison
The fact is that, in all prisons everywhere, cruelties on the one hand and injudicious laxity of discipline on the other have at times appeared and will, at intervals, be renewed except the most vigilant oversight is maintained.
~ Dorothea Dix
Soviet leaders had to treat the outside world as hostile because this provided the only excuse "for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand.
~ John Lewis Gaddis
Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.
~ Marcel Proust