Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.

When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.

For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood.

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.

But I now entered on my fifteenth year - a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.

There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious.

I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.

The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.

Dr. Flint had sworn that he would make me suffer, to my last day, for this new crime against him, as he called it; and as long as he had me in his power he kept his word.

There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.

Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.

No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.

Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.

The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.

Death is better than slavery.

When I was nearly twelve years old, my kind mistress sickened and died.

When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave.

I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.

If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.

Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows.

If a slave is unwilling to go with his new master, he is whipped, or locked up in jail, until he consents to go, and promises not to run away during the year.

The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.

When my babe was born, they said it was premature. It weighed only four pounds; but God let it live.

DURING the first years of my service in Dr. Flint's family, I was accustomed to share some indulgences with the children of my mistress.

Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other.

To insult someone we call him "bestial." For deliberate cruelty and nature, "human" might be the greater insult.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

We are bound to lose Ireland in consequence of years of cruelty, stupidity and misgovernment and I would rather lose her as a friend than as a foe.

I think the suffering, violence and cruelty and Guantanamo and the rest is going to go on and on in Iraq.

I think he is an extremely accessible character. In Data there is no potential for cruelty.

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.

As long as man eats animals how can cruelty to animals be removed.

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.

The terrorists are fighting freedom with all their cunning and cruelty because freedom is their greatest fear - and they should be afraid, because freedom is on the march.

Is the capacity for cruelty inherent in all of us?

Cruelty is a tyrant that's always attended with fear.

I couldn't watch Tom and Jerry. The cruelty was too much. I had all these strange images, of tiny animals, all mixed up.

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.

Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves.

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.

I am an optimist because I want to change things for the better and I know that blood has to be spilled and disharmony and cruelty are necessary to do that.

Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.

I'm very touched on a deep level by cruelty to animals.

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

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.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.

With the first act of cruelty committed in the name of revolution, with the first murder, with the first purge and execution, we have lost the revolution.