The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.
Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.
hatred of oppression seems to me so blended with hatred of the oppressor that I cannot separate them. I feel that no other injury could be so hard to bear, so very very hard to forgive, as that inflicted by cruel oppression and prejudice.
The Raiders of old were vicious and crazy and cruel. Hanging around their locker room was like hanging around the weight room at Folsom Prison.
Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.
Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel.
The translucence that comes when life hardens into a bead of such cruel perfection you see it with the purest clarity. Everything suddenly there--life as it truly is, enormous, appalling, devastating. You see the great sinkholes it makes in people and the harrowing lengths to which love will go to fill them.
Ah, cruel 'tis to love, And cruel not to love, But cruelest of all To love and love in vain.
while nearly every way of falling in love is kind, every way of getting out of love is cruel.
He who sees cruelty and does nothing about it is himself cruel.
Love is cruel as the grave.
These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.
The gods are cruel not because they make us work. They are cruel because they allow us to hope.
When a man tells me he's run out of steam in the sex department, I'll tell him, 'Count your blessings; you've escaped from the clutches of a cruel tyrant. Enjoy!
I don't think I'd ever be cruel to an animal.
Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.
The fear that permeated every fiber of my being was relentless, it was cruel, and it was my best hope for getting through this.
It's a cruel reality. But after a week, very few people survive.
A cruel critic has never made anything; his glibness is a way of inflicting his emptiness on others.
Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.