Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
Our line of work is very cynical, and a lot of it is driven by cynicism, cruelty, and meanness. It's easier to believe the negative stuff than the positive stuff. The feel-good stories don't usually spend a lot of time on the front pages.
If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty and that much harshly, you must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education.
You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.
I'm not satisfied with the term 'evil.' We've inherited this word... and we use it to express our abhorrence when people do awful things, usually acts of cruelty, but I don't think it's anything more than another word for doing something bad.
Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.
Folklore has a moral center to it. Folklore is always, always, always on the side of the underdog, and children have a natural instinct towards justice. They feel indignation at needless cruelty and wistfulness about acts of mercy and kindness.
Shelters, conservationists, those concerned about unnecessary cruelty toward the animals we eat, and people working against species extinction fight to preserve the true riches of our planet, our real inheritance. These are big, critical goals.
In recent years, we have seen the United States back away from pressuring the Castro regime, under the misguided view that placating them with an open hand would yield progress. That naivete has invited only more cruelty and oppression in return.
I do not celebrate the appointment of women to high positions in regimes where cruelty is a favored tool of governance by a patriarchy; if they accept, they are nothing short of foot soldiers of that patriarchy and the violence it has instituted.
There used to be such a thing as a sick joke, or laughing at misfortune, because comedy and laughter are a way of coping. And there is a kind of cruelty to it, but you can separate finding something horrible funny, and what you really think of it.
We think of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and superstition. We think of it as all being about fair maidens in castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these things are wrong.
I really am glad that the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has had the courage to stand up and say that children should not be hit under any circumstances. I am a committed supporter of this campaigning charity for children.
As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don't require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing.
You couldn't enclose people in institutions or hospitals or almshouses in the way the Victorians managed to do. India was too big. Seeing the suffering people was terrible, but I think I was more distraught at the needless cruelty to so many animals.
Labour parades compassion for the poor, but it practised casual cruelty by consigning millions to benefits. Yet there's nothing compassionate about being trapped on benefits, being robbed of the dignity of work, and shut out from the choices that brings.
I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.
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.
Nothing has been left undone by the enemies of freedom. Every art and artifice, every cruelty and outrage has been practiced and perpetrated to destroy the rights of man. In this great struggle, every crime has been rewarded and every virtue has been punished.
I don't inflict horrors on readers. In my research, I've uncovered truly terrible documentations of cruelty and torture, but I leave that offstage. I always pull back and let the reader imagine the details. We all know to one degree or another the horrors of war.
I was brought up in a way that was based purely on the senses. Everything in my upbringing was a reaction to growing up on an organic farm or to the emotions of animal cruelty, as well as the visuals of my mum's and my father's art - he was also an art collector.
What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what is a theatre? are they two and not one? Can they exist separate? Are not religion and politics the same thing? Brotherhood is religion. O demonstrations of reason dividing families in cruelty and pride!
No murder or sin or act of barbarism or cruelty has ever been committed by a person fully absorbed in the reading of a book. By this fact alone, we can conclude that readers are nicer people, at least until they put the book down. When we are reading, we are better.
This circulating medium has a natural tendency to lessen by degrees the value and the use of money, and finally to render it powerless; and consequently to sweep away all the crushing masses of fraud, iniquity, cruelty, corruption and imposition that are built upon it.
Since we can't count on the meat, egg, and dairy industries to protect animals from the most egregious forms of cruelty, what can we, as consumers, do? Opting out of paying someone to allow animals to die in a barn fire or at the slaughterhouse seems pretty reasonable.
As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.
I think there is a complicated side effect to overcoming evil in that we are forever changed by it. I think after we ingest some of the cruelty of the world, it takes years off of our lives, but it also gives us wisdom and a little grace, hopefully a sense of compassion.
I never witness a performance of child-acrobats, or the exhibition of any forced talent, physical or mental, on the part of children, without protesting, at least in my own mind, against the blindness and cruelty of their parents or guardians or whoever has care of them.
When I was a teenager, I used to love the Bronte books, 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Jane Eyre.' In those books, the women do usually manage to heal the men, but in life, I've found it's often the woman gets wounded. Instead of healing a man, she gets affected by his cruelty.
I lived in the Republic of Ireland. I wrote a book about the North but as an outsider. The hatreds there were not mine. I never felt them. I liked how open in most ways Catalan nationalism was, compared to Irish nationalism. I disliked the violence and cruelty in Ireland.
I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'
The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues - probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life - even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.
We are killing a living thing just so that we can wear it? I think fake leather is also beautiful and lasts longer. All I am saying is that if you like wearing leather stuff, put in some extra effort and explore the market. Take on fake leather and stop being part of this cruelty.
I feel like I was transformed by the kindness of people who had every reason to show me cruelty and the transformative power of their decision to treat me like a human being, that was so huge, that anytime somebody wants me to talk about that I feel like I absolutely want to do that.
I had these experiences as a kid; I remember certain things happening in school that were horrifying that I would see, certain things of violence or certain things of cruelty, but around that, something might happen afterwards to cause everyone to laugh, and that always blew me away.
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.
The food system is not a free market. In this country, we impose reasonably high standards of animal welfare - but we haven't applied the same standards to food we import, so all we're really doing is exporting cruelty from Britain elsewhere, and at the same time undermining our farmers.
There's a certain cruelty to being on a big screen as your eyelids start to sag and your hair falls out and turns gray that you either have to be able to handle or not. What you can't do is try to force yourself into roles that you could have played or would have played ten years earlier.
Hollywood, Twitter, our friends - they all contribute to a community of snark. The more we engage in the way that everyone else engages, the more followers, likes, and RTs we get. But we can't rail against the cyberbullies without acknowledging what we also contribute to a culture of cruelty.
I was known for being talented, but I was still the fat girl. And it wasn't what people were looking for. There's a lot that you hear. There's a lot of cruelty out there. Some of it comes from the executive offices. It comes from other artists at times. It was a very difficult thing to overcome.
All of us in society are supposed to believe that cruelty to animals is wrong and that it is a good thing to prevent needless suffering. So if that is true, how can meat be acceptable under any but the most extraordinary circumstances, such as perhaps roasting the bird who died flying into a window?
Animal rights activists talk about cruelty and torture, some backing their assertions by publishing out-of-date photographs of 'experiments' banned long ago. This is a misrepresentation. The work we do is performed with compassion, care, humanity and humility. I have never seen an animal suffer pain.
In my stories, I controlled what happened in a way I couldn't in real life. My characters lived through the horror and degradation of the cruelty of others and they not only survived, they thrived. They gave me hope and laughter, and they kept me going in spite of everything else. They were my heroes.
After the separation of children from families seeking to join the United States was embraced as the official policy of our government, we should ask ourselves what story we will tell. President Trump's story is one of cruelty - that we may do something unfathomable to deter families from coming to America.
Rather than dull our consciences to the unmitigated violence of abortion, the passage of time has only enabled us to see and, frankly, better understand the innate cruelty of abortion and its horrific legacy - victims - while making us more determined than ever to protect the weakest and the most vulnerable.
After dealing with so much dark energy and investigating violent people for my job, I value creatures with pure souls - animals, especially dogs. I believe a higher power/god created these creatures to give us balance from people who can be truly evil. I am an active voice and supporter against animal cruelty.
If there is a person behaving more destructively in popular culture than Mario Lavandeira, I cannot think of one. He has used cruelty as a crass mechanism to build up his own celebrity and has utilized political correctness to protect himself while using it as a weapon to dehumanize those he doesn't agree with.
There is no denying that unhappiness - even violence - exists in some arranged marriages. Or that some arranged marriages are borne out of cruelty. And part of that six percent global divorce rate can be attributed to the powerful stigma against divorce that's present in countries where arranged marriage is common.
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.
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.