Quotes About Ruthlessness

The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power. In the seventeenth century, and even in the early eighteenth century, it was not, therefore, with all its theatre of terror, a lingering hang-over from an earlier age. Its ruthlessness, its spectacle, its physical violence, its unbalanced play of forces, its meticulous ceremonial, its entire apparatus were inscribed in the political functioning of the penal system.

They were going to die slower and harder than any son of a bitch had ever died before, and while they died I'd laugh my god-damn head off!

A part of him wanted to cram his reality down her throat, forcing her to accept him, with no excuses offered. A wiser part of him, the man he'd used to be, warned against such ruthlessness.

blow your trump— blister your lungs!—Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his watergate upon the stream!

But he did not lack the ruthlessness required of all military commanders in wartime.

Machiavelli had some cold tricks for people who wanted to be demagogues and wanted to take over the world.

A vain man can never be utterly ruthless: he wants to win applause and therefore he accommodates himself to others

Kallor shrugged. '[...] I have walked this land when the T'lan Imass were but children. I have commanded armies a hundred thousand strong. I have spread the fire of my wrath across entire continents, and sat alone upon tall thrones. Do you grasp the meaning of this?' 'Yes,' [said Caladan Brood.] 'You never learn.

Success always necessitates a degree of ruthlessness. Given the choice of friendship or success, I'd probably choose success.

The Apprentice delivered the central sales pitch of free-market theory, telling viewers that by unleashing your most selfish and ruthless side, you are actually a hero—creating jobs and fueling growth. Don't be nice, be a killer.

On my estate, there are older guys and there are dangerous things happening. But I had my ball with me and that made me feel safe. That's where I developed my strength, mentality and ruthlessness.

But simple people don't understand complicated ones and thrust the latter back on themselves, more ruthlessly than any others, I thought. The biggest mistake is to think that one can be rescued by so-called simple people. A person goes to them in an extremely needy condition and begs desperately to be rescued and they thrust this person even more deeply into his own despair. And how are they supposed to save the extravagant one in his extravagance, I thought. Wertheimer

It was as though committing murders had purged him of lesser rudeness. Or perhaps, Starling thought, it excited him to see her marked in this particular way. She couldn't tell. The sparks in his eyes flew into his darkness like fireflies down a cave.

Blood only serves to wash ambition's hands.

People go on blithely organizing and believing in the remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans.

in so far as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists.

In this way the creative force can drain the human impulses to such a degree that the personal ego must develop all sorts of bad qualities—ruthlessness, selfishness and vanity (so-called "autoerotism")—and even every kind of vice, in order to maintain the spark of life and to keep itself from being wholly bereft.

The young are self-satisfied really and utterly ruthless.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don't see why we should feed our enemies fat in order for them to fight harder.

People in this arena weren't crowned for their compassion

You can win, for a time, through ruthlessness and stealth; you can garner in more of this world's goods than you will need, by sheer force and shrewd strategy, without taking the time or going to the trouble of being agreeable; but, sooner or later, you will come to that point in life at which you will feel the pangs of remorse and the emptiness of your well filled purse.

In the long run everything with the most minute vulnerability breaks, given the ruthlessness of time.

detest the ruthlessness of selection, the inexorable disloyalty of Mother Nature. I detest the notion of improvement thanks to harm to others. As a humanist, I stand against the antifragility of systems at the expense of individuals, for if you follow the reasoning, this makes us humans individually irrelevant.