#cruel

You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another life.) You liked to go to the pound and look at them. You tried to send them messages of comfort. I couldn’t go because I started crying the one time I tried. All those eyes and the barks like sobs. ↗

— Francesca Lia Block

#animal-cruelty #animal-kindness #animal-rights #animal-welfare #animals

...people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham - all a sham, James, and it won't stand when things come to be turned inside out and upside down for what they are. ↗

— Anna Sewell

#horses #religion #beauty

Cruel', O'Kelly laughed, 'it's cruel to tell children the truth. If anything convinces me of God's mercy, then it's his gift of making us unable to lie. ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#cruelty #lie #lying #truth #men

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony. ↗

— Benjamin Britten

#beautiful #beauty #cruel #disappointment #everlasting

This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#animal-rights #animal-welfare #animals #food #hunting

...the years have taught me not to wonder too much at the dark things men do. Strange how it is that men never act crueller than when they're fighting for the sake of an idea. We've been killing since Cain over who stands closer to god. It seems to me that cruelty is just in the way of things. You drive yourself mad if you take it all personal. Those who hurt you don't have the power over you they would like. That's why they do what they do. And I'm not going to give them the power now. But it was a cruel thing that they did, and when they had finished hurting me, a splinter of loneliness seemed to break off and stay inside me forever. ↗

— Marcel Theroux

#hurt #ideology #men #men

[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#cruelty #dishonesty #double-standards #hell #morality

Ellen had said that her mother was afraid of the ocean, that it was too cold and too big. The sky was, too, thought Annemarie. The whole world was: too cold, too big. And too cruel. ↗

— Lois Lowry

#cruel #sky #world #ocean

Hollywood is a very strong machine that needs, and in... especially with female actors, fresh flesh. It's that cruel. But that's the way it is. ↗

— Antonio Banderas

#especially #female #flesh #fresh #hollywood

It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#kindness #cruelty