Pieta > Pieta's Quotes

“There is a savage beast in every man, and when you hand that man a sword or spear and send him forth to war, the beast stirs.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“It was a strange monster, for beneath its exterior it was frightened and sickened by its own violence. It chastised itself for its savagery. And sometimes it had no heart for violence and rebelled against it utterly.”
― Kristin Cashore, Graceling

“The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!”
― Robert E. Howard, King Kull

“Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.

Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war.”
― Nikola Tesla

“Laws are made not to be broken.
They are made to curb our savagery.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Poets write beautiful words to describe
savagery-wrapped civilization nowadays.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend.
And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.
Let the fool gape and shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink.
But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff--with his own inborn strength.
Principles? Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row--is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go ashore for a howl and a dance?
Well, no--I didn't. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on those leaky steam-pipes--I tell you.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Killing, raping and looting have been common practices in religious societies, and often carried out with clerical sanction. The catalogue of notorious barbarities – wars and massacres, acts of terrorism, the Inquisition, the Crusades, the chopping off of thieves’ hands, the slicing off of clitorises and labia majora, the use of gang rape as punishment, and manifold other savageries committed in the name of one faith or another — attests to religion’s longstanding propensity to induce barbarity, or at the very least to give it free rein. The Bible and the Quran have served to justify these atrocities and more, with women and gay people suffering disproportionately. There is a reason the Middle Ages in Europe were long referred to as the Dark Ages; the millennium of theocratic rule that ended only with the Renaissance (that is, with Europe’s turn away from God toward humankind) was a violent time.

Morality arises out of our innate desire for safety, stability and order, without which no society can function; basic moral precepts (that murder and theft are wrong, for example) antedated religion. Those who abstain from crime solely because they fear divine wrath, and not because they recognize the difference between right and wrong, are not to be lauded, much less trusted. Just which practices are moral at a given time must be a matter of rational debate. The 'master-slave' ethos – obligatory obeisance to a deity — pervading the revealed religions is inimical to such debate. We need to chart our moral course as equals, or there can be no justice.”
― Jeffrey Tayler

“The creatures I have sent to their God are not men. They abdicated the right to the name by committing acts of inhuman savagery so that they cannot even count themselves among God's beasts. For even the beasts have better reason for what they do- and so have I. If those be men, I rank myself gladly with the animals. There are places in this world where the force of law holds sway; it is a great pity that Larissa is not one of them.”
― Rebecca Ashe

“There is nothing more savage than modern civilization.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”
― William Kingdon Clifford, Ethics of Belief and Other Essays

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The unhappiest people in this world, are those who care the most about what other people think.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“When you're surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you're by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don't feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you're really alone.”
― Fiona Apple

“Good humor may be said to be one of the very best articles of dress one can wear in society.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, Sketches and Travels, Etc.

“The soul is healed by being with children.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Does a rake deserve to possess anything of worth, since he chases everything in skirts and then imagines he can successfully hide his shame by slandering [women in general]?”
― Christine de Pizan, Der Sendbrief vom Liebesgott / The Letter of the God of Love

“Everything good in life is either immoral, illegal or fattening.”
― Nicole Richie

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
― Elie Wiesel

“The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“I want to commit the murder I was imprisoned for.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“Revenge, the sweetest morsel to the mouth that ever was cooked in hell.”
― Walter Scott, The Heart of Mid-Lothian

“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

“People don't always get what they deserve in this world.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
― Voltaire