cruelty

And for Peter... well, sometimes cruelty is kindness in disguise. Sometimes pain is the best teacher. Sometimes it does you no harm to realize that there's a limit to what you can get away with.

In a cruel land, you either learned to laugh at cruelty or spent your life weeping.

Jack laughed behind him, a mirthless sound from a man who had been on the wrong end of life's ironies too many times.

_one of those dreadful boarding schools. It was down on the South Coast. I think some very unpleasant things happened there_. So many lives were distorted by such cruelty. I know so many men who had to put up with that, so many_.

Silence!_ Korbolo snapped. He eyed Duiker. __ou are the historian who rode with Coltaine.__he historian faced him. __ am.___ou are a soldier.___s you say.___ do, and so you shall die with these soldiers, in a manner no different-___ou mean to slaughter ten thousand unarmed men and women, Korbolo Dom?___ mean to cripple Tavore before she even sets foot on this continent. I mean to make her too furious to think. I mean to crack that façade so she dreams of vengeance day and night, poisoning her every decision.___ou always fashioned yourself as the Empire__ harshest Fist, didn__ you, Korbolo Dom? As if cruelty__ a virtue_

God is so cruel," she murmured reflectively, as though answering him."Yes," he admitted, from the vantage point of going blind. "Though maybe people are kinder if He made them that way.""You've run with a different crowd. Rich people are nicer to rich people.""Sure. Yes. That's why I've washed up here. Rich people couldn't have been nicer to me.

He who makes fun of a short and fat man__ weight is much less cruel than he who makes fun of his height.

Such a brute should underneath all his braggart tricks, his viciousness, his vileness, be a coward. But I am convinced that he was not. Because even cowardice requires a certain degree of sensitivity, and a certain value for life.

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

People talk sometimes of 'bestial' cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beast; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically, so artfully cruel.

When we're struck with cruelty, we can either inflict the same on others like it's a rite of passage, or decide that here is where it stops.

It__ that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money.It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, __es, it__ nice, isn__ it? Polish-Jewish skin it__ made of, we find that__ best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins._ And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, __reblinka _ 100% human stereate._ Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is

Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without impact. Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

I know about sureness,' said Didactylos. 'I remember, before I was blind, I went to Omnia once. And in your Citadel I saw a crowd stoning a man to death in a pit. Ever seen that?''It has to be done,' Brutha mumbled. 'So the soul can be shriven and-''Don't know about the soul. Never been that kind of philosopher,' said Didactylos. 'All I know is, it was a horrible sight.''The state of the body is not-''Oh, I'm not talking about the poor bugger in the pit,' said the philosopher. 'I'm talking about the people throwing the stones. They were sure all right. They were sure it wasn't them in the pit. You could see it in their faces. So glad it wan't them in the pit that they were throwing just as hard as they could.

Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.

In knowing "what's best" for our patients, we tyrannize them with our good intentions. Behind our benevolent persona, our ruthless shadow is letting out the clutch.

Words can be as deadly as bullets. But bullets are faster acting. ~ Brandon Hull

Remorse shows the difference between a cruel person and one that is not.