I see that the path of progress has never taken a straight line, but has always been a zigzag course amid the conflicting forces of right and wrong, truth and error, justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy.

I have buckets of sympathy for the obese, often subject to cruelty, ridicule, denunciation, and contempt.

Some folks hesitate to seize additional strength because they think it wrong or dangerous to be a powerful individual. Somehow they have acquired the false notion that tyranny or dictatorship or cruelty are the outcomes of a powerful personality. These characteristics are not power. They are weaknesses disguised as power.

Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.

Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor.

When I first saw a picture of the crucifixion, I lost respect for my parents. I suddenly realised that this is what the adult world is like - full of cruelty and hypocrisy.

I am very sad for men and women trapped in any relationship where there is cruelty, dominance, inequity. I long for the liberation of all people.

Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.

To insult someone we call him 'bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Women are hypocrites. Women are opportunists. Women are liars. They are abusers and bullies and manipulators. They are capable of cruelty, callousness, and evil. Just like men.

Let us be honest with each other. The threat to marriage is not the gays. It is a lack of loving commitment - whether it is found in the form of neglect, indifference, cruelty or adultery, to name just a few manifestations of the loveless desert in which too many marriages come to grief.

Our online news feeds aggregate all of the world's pain and cruelty, dragging our brains into a kind of learned helplessness. Technology that provides us with near-complete knowledge without a commensurate level of agency isn't humane.

It is hard to conceive of the utter demoralization, of the political blindness and immorality, of the patriotic dishonesty, of the cruelty and degradation of a people who supplemented the incomparable Declaration of Independence with the Fugitive Slave Law.

If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin - and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word 'genocide.' He was also its victim.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one's friends' and relatives' children.

Cruelty is a tyrant that's always attended with fear.

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Fear is the parent of cruelty.

Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood - we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we.

Citizens of Rome might boast that the claim of 'Civus romanus sum' set them apart from barbarians and slaves, and it was true up to a point, but Roman citizens lived in a society that accepted pain, cruelty, and torture as the norm, and in which there was no suggestion of equality at birth or mercy in the afterlife.

I wanted to get far away from those who believed in cruelty, so then I went to France, a land of true freedom, democracy, equality and fraternity.