The most appalling cruelties are committed by apparently virtuous governments in expectation of a great good to come, never learning that the evil done now is the sure destroyer of the expected good.

—Katherine Anne Porter

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About Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter (born Callie Russell Porter; May 15, 1890 – September 18, 1980) was an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, poet, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in the United States that year, but her short stories received much more...

More quotations from Katherine Anne Porter

The people who are doing the work and the fighting and the dying, and those who are doing the talking, are not at all the same people.

—Katherine Anne Porter

More quotations tagged with “cruelty”

Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty.

—Samuel Johnson in The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

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As one reads history… one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

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If one person is unkind to an animal, it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people.

—Ruth Harrison

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Cruelty is easy, and it breeds only misery. Kindness is harder, and you have to be brave to give it. To be cruel, you can stay closed off from everyone, wear a mask, but to be kind, in essence, to show love, you have to make yourself vulnerable, show your true self to someone and open yourself up to rejection.

—L.H. Cosway in The Nature of Cruelty

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It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.

—Kingsley Amis

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History

23 Nov 2014 Added