Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.
George Eliot

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.
Leon Trotsky

In the context of interfaith encounter, we need to bring to the surface how our actual beliefs shape what we do - not simply to agree that kindness is better than cruelty.
Rowan D. Williams

In the name of noble purposes men have committed unspeakable acts of cruelty against one another.
J. William Fulbright

Is the capacity for cruelty inherent in all of us?
Soledad O'Brien

It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.
Lionel Trilling

It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.
Ilka Chase

It may be a mistake, that man, in a state of nature, is more disposed to cruelty than courtesy.
Mercy Otis Warren

Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.
Frank Herbert

Love has its place, as does hate. Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge.
Meir Kahane

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.
Marquis de Sade

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.
Anna Sewell

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

No baseness or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter our human world, but that loyal love shall be able in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason its fitting deed of atonement.
Josiah Royce

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
John Berger

Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody's business to interfere when they see it.
Anna Sewell

People nearly always believe, and are willing to back it up with weapons and cruelty, that their religion and way of life is better than the other person's.
Caroline B. Cooney

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.
Jean Rostand

The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear.
Heinrich Himmler