To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.

Again, it may be said, that to love justice and equality the people need no great effort of virtue; it is sufficient that they love themselves.

The general will rules in society as the private will governs each separate individual.

The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.

Any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil.

Pity is treason.

Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is altogether popular.

To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.

Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.

The king must die so that the country can live.

Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime.

Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.

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.

What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what is a theatre? are they two and not one? Can they exist separate? Are not religion and politics the same thing? Brotherhood is religion. O demonstrations of reason dividing families in cruelty and pride!

Besides, wouldn't it be wonderful if no one ever had to worry about the random cruelty of fatal illness or the woes of old age attacking them or their loved ones?

No baseness or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter our human world, but that loyal love shall be able in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason its fitting deed of atonement.

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

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.

Beware the ends of the earth and the exotic: the drama is on your doorstep wherever the slums; are, wherever there is malnutrition, wherever there is exploitation and cruelty.

Farewell, fair cruelty.

I see that the path of progress has never taken a straight line, but has always been a zigzag course amid the conflicting forces of right and wrong, truth and error, justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy.

I am very sad for men and women trapped in any relationship where there is cruelty, dominance, inequity. I long for the liberation of all people.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable.

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.

Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody's business to interfere when they see it.

There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.