A Quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Quote Topics

Certainly Cruelty Intellectual Kid Kind Perhaps Sin Worst

Quote Author

Gilbert K. Chesterton
English - Writer
May 29, 1874 - June 14, 1936

Cruelty is cruelty, whether it's cruelty to children, to the elderly, to dogs and cats, or to chickens.

Russell Simmons

It seems to me that liberal and humane people, of whom there are many among us, would, if they were asked to rank the vices, put cruelty first. Intuitively they would choose cruelty as the worst thing we do.

Judith N. Shklar

It's the worst kind of cruelty — the thoughtless kind. You can't cope with it.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

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

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.

Antonin Artaud

I don't think anything's cruel - if you're so sensitive these days that you see cruelty everywhere, unfortunately every time a comedian comes on television, you're going to accuse him of cruelty, because that's the kind of humour that the English people enjoy.

Roy Hodgson

Tolerance of Cruelty in any form is a degraded state of mind and soul. When we freely allow the massacre and prolonged torture of defenseless creatures, it increases our receptivity to human cruelty and war and steals our humanity, peace and soul. Very little speeds and greases your way to Hell, like animal cruelty.

Russell Boyd

When humans act with cruelty we characterize them as "animals", yet the only animal that displays cruelty is humanity.

Anthony D. Williams

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.

George Bernard Shaw

The only thing worse than cruelty is delegated cruelty.

Matthew Scully

The truth of the matter is the real story are the people who rise above all of this incredible cruelty. Otherwise that cruelty wins.

George Clooney

We cannot have two hearts, one for the animals and one for men. In cruelty towards the former and cruelty to the latter there is no difference but in the victim.

Alphonse de Lamartine

I don't believe that anyone connected with bullfighting would deny that what happens in the ring has an element of suffering and perhaps cruelty to it. So then it comes back to whether the suffering and cruelty is justified by its place in a tradition that has deep roots in the culture. At present, the view in Catalonia apparently is that it does not.