Cruelty

Cruelty can be described as indifference to suffering, and even positive pleasure in inflicting it. Sadism can also be related to this form of action or concept.

Sourced

• Man's inhumanity to man
  Makes countless thousands mourn!
  • Robert Burns, Man Was Made to Mourn (1786).

• Detested sport,
  That owes its pleasures to another's pain.
  • William Cowper, The Task (1785), Book III, line 326.

• It is not linen you're wearing out,
  But human creatures' lives.
  • Thomas Hood, Song of the Shirt (1843).

• Even bear-baiting was esteemed heathenish and unchristian: the sport of it, not the inhumanity, gave offence.
  • David Hume, The History of England, (1754-62), Volume I, Chapter LXII.

• The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
  • Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, History of England (1849-1861), Volume I, Chapter II.

• I must be cruel, only to be kind.
  • William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600-02), Act III, scene 4, line 178.

• Men so noble,
  However faulty, yet should find respect
  For what they have been; 'tis a cruelty
  To load a falling man.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry VIII (1613), Act V, scene 3, line 74.

• See what a rent the envious Casca made.
  • William Shakespeare, Julius Cæsar (1599), Act III, scene 2, line 179.

• You are the cruell'st she alive,
  If you will lead these graces to the grave
  And leave the world no copy.
  • William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (c. 1601-02), Act I, scene 5, line 259.

• If ever henceforth thou
  These rural latches to his entrance open,
  Or hoop his body more with thy embraces,
  I will devise a death as cruel for thee
  As thou art tender to't.
  • William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale (c. 1610-11), Act IV, scene 4, line 448.

• Inhumanity is caught from man,
  From smiling man.
  • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night V, line 158.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 152-53.

• Contre les rebelles c'est cruauté que d'estre humain, et humanité d'estre cruel.
  • It is cruelty to be humane to rebels, and humanity is cruelty.
  • Attributed to Charles IX. According to M. Fournier, an expression taken from a sermon of Corneille Muis, Bishop of Bitoute. Used by Catherine De Medicis.

• An angel with a trumpet said,
  "Forever more, forever more,
  The reign of violence is o'er!"
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Occultation of Orion, Stanza 6.

• Je voudrais bien voir la grimace qu'il fait à cette heure sur cet échafaud.
  • I would love to see the grimace he [Marquis de Cinq-Mars] is now making on the scaffold.
  • Louis XIII; see Histoire de Louis XIII, IV, p. 416.

• Gaudensque viam fecisse ruina.
  • He rejoices to have made his way by ruin.
  • Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, Pharsalia, I. 150.