195 quotes found
“You cannot harden your heart to the future just because of your past. You cannot use cruelty against yourself to justify cruelty to others.”
“Cruelty had been his weapon. But such a tool is dangerous and can spread further than you intend.”
“There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency—which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours—to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm.”
“Is it murder to kill a man if the man never existed? To the man it is.”
“There goes the girl with the wings," they say. "The damned dreamer with her eyes shut to the world.""There goes the misguided soul with her heart buried in the ground."They taunt. They lie. They li...”
“I must be cruel only to be kind;Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.”
“It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.”
“Sweet mother Mary, boy, think about what you’re doing! Be cruel or be kind, but don’t be both, because now you’ve made a mess you can’t clean up in a hurry.”
“In all Thénardier's outpourings, the words and gestures, the fury blazing in his eyes, this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado and abjectness, arrogance, pettiness...”
“Inhumanity is part of humanity as much as suffering is a part of stories. Cruelty is written in the human script.”
“For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watc...”
“...perhaps great sins start as simple weakness, and the consistent placing of self before others.”
“Is cruelty still cruel if it is necessary? Is cruelty still cruel if it is part of a lie?”
“'In our inmost and secret heart, which you ask us to bare to you, we wish to banish them as we were banished, to a cold and lonely house, in the charge of a man who hated us. And we wish them trapp...”
“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 th...”
“So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence.”
“... the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a supply of fresh meat for her offspring after her own decease, calls in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive cruelty...”
“I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.”
“There is no honor in cruelty.”
“He had discovered that there was not just one God but many, and some were more than cruel — they were insane, and that changed all. Cruelty, after all, was understandable. With insanity, however, t...”
