A Quote by Pedro Calderon de la Barca

All just laws condemn cruelty.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Quote Topics

Condemn Cruelty Just Laws

Quote Author

Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Spanish - Dramatist
January 17, 1600 - May 25, 1681

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

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

Chuck Palahniuk

The difference between justice and forgiveness: To be just is to condemn the fault and, because of the fault, to condemn the doer as well. To forgive is to condemn the fault but to spare the doer. That's what the forgiving God does.

Miroslav Volf

The moralist must praise heroism and condemn cruelty; but the moralist does not explain events.

Georges Lefebvre

If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America - even those designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants.’ If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles.

Alberto J. Mora

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

Russell Simmons

No, the people standing before Christ and Pilate during the judgment scene do not condemn an entire race for the death of Christ anymore than the actions of Mussolini condemn all Italians, or the heinous crimes of Stalin condemn all Russians.

Jim Caviezel

To call a work of art Kitsch is to condemn it for being bad art. But there is a great deal of bad art that we do not condemn as Kitsch. To condemn something as Kitsch is to condemn it on moral grounds.

Karsten Harries

What has marked Chinese society is its level of cruelty, not just revolutions and wars. We ought to reject it totally, otherwise in another upheaval there will be further cruelty.

Jung Chang

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws.

Baron de Montesquieu

Freedom of expression is not absolute. Countries have laws that define the framework for exercising this right and which, for instance, condemn racist language.

Tariq Ramadan

Compassion to an offender who has grossly violated the laws is, in effect, a cruelty to the peaceable subject who has observed them.

Junius

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Most laws condemn the soul and pronounce sentence. The result of the law of my God is perfect. It condemns but forgives. It restores - more than abundantly - what it takes away.

Jim Elliot

An author describing the methods of intensive farming, or the excesses of sport hunting, or even the harsher uses of animals in science writes with confidence that most readers will share his sense of concern and indignation. Sounding the call to action-convincing people that change is not only necessary, but actually possible-is more problematic. In protecting animals from cruelty, it is always just one step from the mainstream to the fringe. To condemn the wrong is obvious, to suggest its abolition radical.