Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness.
Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont

Most children turn out badly because they have the wrong parental image. This doesn't mean their parents are criminal. It means they are boring and cruel.
Hedy Lamarr

Note too that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.
Ovid

One can't be kind to one person and cruel to another.
Morarji Desai

Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.
Leo Buscaglia

Others too would occasionally entertain and privately express such doubts; though we all had been most solemnly warned by the cruel murder of Saint Francis.
Maria Monk

People are constantly clamoring for the joy of life. As for me, I find the joy of life in the hard and cruel battle of life - to learn something is a joy to me.
August Strindberg

Perhaps it should only be added that the Gorean master, though often strict, is seldom cruel. The girl knows, if she pleases him, her lot will be an easy one.
John Norman

Scotsmen are metaphisical and emotional, they are sceptical and mystical, they are romantic and ironic, they are cruel and tender, and full of mirth and despair.
William Dunbar

So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public.
Marquis de Sade

Terror made me cruel.
Emily Bronte

That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel?
Joseph Addison

The bottom of the sea is cruel.
Hart Crane

The foolish and cruel notion that a wife is to obey her husband has sent more women to the grave than to the courts for a divorce.
Lemuel K. Washburn

The force we use on ourselves, to prevent ourselves from loving, is often more cruel than the severest treatment at the hands of one loved.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.
Leo Tolstoy

The lonely wanderer, who watches by the seashore the waves that roll between him and his home, talks of cruel facts, material barriers that, just because they are material, and not ideal, shall be the irresistible foes of his longing heart.
Josiah Royce

The mad, cruel, and accursed American war.
Lord George Gordon

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.
Hunter S. Thompson

The national security state has many unfair and cruel weapons in its arsenal, but that of junk science is one which can be fought and perhaps defeated.
Aldrich Ames