Human Cruelty Quotes

“Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance and her sunlight, from before human cruelty or suffering. She overwhelms man by the contrast between divine beauty and social hideousness. She spares him nothing of her loveliness, neither wing or butterfly, nor song of bird; in the midst of murder, vengeance, barbarism, he must feel himself watched by holy things; he cannot escape the immense reproach of universal nature and the implacable serenity of the sky. The deformity of human laws is forced to exhibit itself naked amidst the dazzling rays of eternal beauty. Man breaks and destroys; man lays waste; man kills; but the summer remains summer; the lily remains the lily; and the star remains the star.
...
As though it said to man, 'Behold my work. and yours.”
― Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three

“Bluebell had been saying that he knew the men hated us for raiding their crops and gardens, and Toadflax answered, 'That wasn't why they destroyed the warren. It was just because we were in their way. They killed us to suit themselves.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“He has seen enough of daily evil to be thankful for small goods that come his way.”
― Bernard Pomerance, The Elephant Man

“Men like that — when they know they won’t be found out — they will do anything.”
― Michelle Paver

“To live with his physical hideousness, incapacitating deformities and unremiting pain is trial enough, but to be exposed to the cruelly lacerating expressions of horror and disgust by all who behold him -- is even more difficult to bear. [...] For in order to survive, Merrick forces himself to suffer these humiliations, I repeat, humiliations, in order to survive, thus he exposes himself to crowds who pay to gape and yawp at this freak of nature, the Elephant Man.”
― Bernard Pomerance, The Elephant Man

“The sight of her made him understand why he'd lost his faith in God.”
― Sarah Langan, The Keeper

“Riding out with the Old Surrey and Burstow Hunt, White recorded the first time he saw a kill with distanced fascination. The fox was dug out of a drain where it had taken refuge and thrown to the hounds. They tore it to pieces while a circle of human onlookers 'screeched them on'. The humans, White thought, were disgusting, their cries 'tense, self-conscious, and histerically animal'. But the hounds were not. 'The savagery of the hounds', he wrote, 'was deep-rooted and terrible, but rang true, so that it was not horrible like that of the human.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“I’ve got one less eye to see half as much cruelty.”
― Steven Seril, The Destroyer of Worlds: An Answer to Every Question

“People often describe such human cruelty as "bestial", but that's of course, unfair to animals, for no beast could ever be as cruel as man, I mean as refinedly and artistically cruel. The tiger simply gnaws and tears his victim to pieces because that's all he knows. It would never occur to a tiger to nail people to fences by their ears, even if he were able to do it.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov

“We are accessories to human crime.”
― Rae Knightly, Ben Archer and the World Beyond

“People like to believe they are better than the society they live in but the majority make no active change in their own lives to better the society by helping others. When homelessness and animal cruelty not only prevail but are seen as 'inevitable' or 'normal' we allow being comfortable in our own lives to let the cruel society we believe ourselves better than to continue its cycles. From this comfort begets cruelty.”
― Isabella Poretsis

“Germans found the conditions where "one could do as one pleased," where they could kill Jews in large numbers for the first time, in 1941, as they invaded the Soviet Union. It was in the zone of double occupation, where Soviet rule preceded German, where the Soviet destruction of interwar states was followed by the German annihilation of Soviet institutions, that a Final Solution took shape.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning