Cruelest Quotes

Love is hungry and severe. Love is not unselfish or bashful or servile or gentle. Love demands everything. Love is not serene, and it keeps no records. Love sometimes gives up, loses faith, even hope, and it cannot endure everything. Love, sometimes, ends. But its memory lasts forever, and forever it may come again. Love is not a mountain, it is a wheel. No harsher praxis exists in this world. There are three things that will beggar the heart and make it crawl - faith, hope and love - and the cruelest of these is love. ~ Catherynne M Valente

The cruelest lies are often told without a word
The kindest truths are often spoken, never heard ~ Ben Folds

The factory system is one of the worst and cruelest things ever invented to pamper the rich at the expense of the poor. It fattens them, and melts the flesh off our bones: it clothes them in grand raiment, and bids us shiver in rags: it brings all indulgences within their reach, and kills the industrious creatures whose toil provides them. ~ Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna

We slander the hyena; man is the fiercest and cruelest animal. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Love is the cruelest event. ~ Suman Pokhrel

She'd loved Mada Vittora once. A twisted, misunderstood love, but even the cruelest forms of love were never lost without heartache. ~ Megan Shepherd

Watercolors couldn't have begun to capture the sky in that moment, just as it prepared to brighten for dawn. The cruelest truth about life is that it just goes on--the sun rises, gravity keeps your feet on the ground, flowers open their faces to greet the sky. Your world could be dissolving with grief or pain or anger, but the sky would still give you the most breathtaking sunrise of violet, warming to shell pink. ~ Alexandra Bracken

The cruelest prison of all is the prison of the mind. ~ Piri Thomas

We all have a right to know, and if the government has been suppressing information about other life forms, that's the cruelest hoax of all. ~ Dwight Schultz

Time is the cruelest of physicians, healing
All wounds, but always slowly, looping
A surgical needle through the mind's flesh, experiencing
Torment again over again, repeating
Until anesthetics bring an end to feeling. ~ Justin Wetch

I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it. ~ John Steinbeck

If I catch you, I might do anything. I might strip the skin from your bones as I drain you dry. Or I might drag you into my chambers and have you pleasure me in ways you cannot even imagine. I might even take mercy on you, and that would be the cruelest injustice of all, because for you, it would only be a temporary reprieve. ~ Nenia Campbell

It's weird like, you can see the cruelest part of the world. The cruelest part. But then on the other side you see the most beautiful part, do you know? And it's like you go from one extreme to the next and they're both worth it, because you wouldn't see one without the other. But that cruel part, is damn cruel and you'll never forget it. But that heaven ... is heaven. ~ Britney Spears

April is the cruelest month.' So begins T.S. Eliot's 1922 masterpiece, a 434-line poem titled 'The Waste Land.' Until my employment as a trail maintenance worker, this had simply been a line on a page, albeit a line fraught with metaphorical import and potential. Now I saw it for what it was - a big fat lie - because Eliot grew up in St. Louis and no one forgets what a Missouri summer is like. If the Nobel laureate had been truthful with himself, the opening verse would start out, 'June's a bitch. ~ Michael Gurnow

She dumped me for the worst reason of all. For absolutely no reason at all ... I mean, if she fell in love with someone else, or I did something wrong, or I let her down in some unforgivable way ... That, I'd understand, right? But instead, she said ... it wasn't anything. Not a single thing. It was just me. I was nice. I was kind. We just ... she didn't see the connection anymore. I think she thought I was boring. And the cruelest part is, when someone says something mean about you, you know when they're right. ~ Brad Meltzer

What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being. ~ George Saunders

The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice. ~ Irving Howe

Though she would never admit it to polite Society, Lady Georgette Thorold hated brandy almost as much as she hated husbands. So it was the cruelest of jokes when she awoke with nary a clue to her surroundings, smelling like one and pressed up against the other. ~ Jennifer McQuiston

India's head ached. Insomnia was still her most attentive, cruelest lover, demanding and possessing her selfishly whenever it chose to do so. Light-heartedness was beyond her today. A man of middling quality was trying to marry her, and there was something wrong with her father's voice on the phone. ~ Salman Rushdie

Of all the well-meant emotions pity is the cruelest to share. ~ Joan Slonczewski

But you raised a ruckus about and threatened to perform a Julius Caesarian on anybody on anybody who calls April the cruelest month- I was Damn born out of the loins of my father in the spring of April, you claimed. Surgeon, you stood up for the month of buds and bitches like a true Kuon Kunos ~ Aporva Kala

I would settle for even his worst self, his cruelest trickster self, if only he could be here."

-Jude Duarte ~ Holly Black

Laughing at someone's dream was one of the cruelest things a person can do to another. ~ Chris Colfer

Human self-righteousness denies the need for the saving, enabling grace of Christ. Human righteousness embraces the cruelest of Satan's lies, that a person can be righteous by keeping the law. If that were true, there would have been no need for the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ. ~ Paul David Tripp

The cruelest, narrowest, most evil people will always rise to power because they'll always be the ones most willing to wrap themselves in the crescent flag and murder people in God's name. ~ Orson Scott Card

What is the cruelest thing you can do to someone who is trying to concentrate? Call their name. ~ Bela Karolyi

People can be cruelest to those they love. ~ Veronica Rossi

Sometimes I ask God what I did to deserve her love. I maintain my innocence, and of all the forms of God's wrath from plagues, pestilence, and famine, her love is by far the cruelest. ~ Jarod Kintz

Because believing you're not alone is the cruelest trick of all. ~ Morgan Matson

All about us were people. Perhaps a hundred. Men. Experience had taught me that humans were cruelest when segregated by sex, and the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach became led. What had I let myself in for? ~ C.S. Friedman

The cruelest thing you can do to a person who's living in panic is to offer him or her hope that turns out false. When the crash comes its intolerable. ~ Robert Ludlum

But then, maybe "I don't believe in you" is the cruelest way to kill a monster. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Dating back to the Iliad, ancient Egypt and beyond, burial rites have formed a critical function in most human societies. Whether we cremate a loved one or inter her bones, humans possess a deep-set instinct to mark death in some deliberate, ceremonial fashion. Perhaps the cruelest feature of forced disappearance as an instrument of war is that it denies the bereaved any such closure, relegating them to a permanent limbo of uncertainty. ~ Patrick Radden Keefe

It was the cruelest of destiny's tricks, the death of a young person. ~ Danielle Steel

Isolation is the cruelest of punishments, and it had never occurred to me that I was something less than human because I wasn't a man. ~ Patricia Cornwell

Golf is the cruelest game, because eventually it will drag you out in front of the whole school, take your lunch money and slap you around. ~ Rick Reilly

Beware young brides: The cruelest behaviors on earth are done in the name of, what some call, 'love.' Therefore, the Shulamite does a much better job at defining love than pop-culture.
pg 4 ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would've expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics--instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on and save up and lovlingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to come would make up for them all by developing into the meanest, cruelest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness.

To all appearance resolute, adventurous, manly, the city would not shake that terrible all-night rape, when "he" was forced to submit, surrending, inadmissably, blindly feminine, into the Hellfire embrace of "her" beloved. He spent the years afterward forgetting and fabulating and trying to get back some self-respect. But inwardly, deep inside, "he" remained the catamite of Hell, the punk at the disposal of all the denizens thereof, the bitch in men's clothing. ~ Thomas Pynchon

How many humans over thousands of years have stood thus with their horses, seeing in them the lines of universal perfection, the majesty of grace and power, feeling stronger and more beautiful themselves for their contact with the magical power of such a steed? Such is the lure of the horse. In a world in which grace is neither synonymous nor usually compatible with power, the horse has remained an ancient symbol of strength and elegance, an icon of a majestic essence that exists far outside mere human beings. Because of the space that lies between us - only the cruelest amongst us ever truly conquers a horse - there is magic. " - Margot Page ~ Margot Page

The Establishment center ... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation. ~ George McGovern

Reality has a way of bursting the bubble of illusion, and an affair is one of the biggest illusions that anyone can experience in life. It's based almost entirely on emotions with almost no logic to support it.

That fact becomes clear when children, employers, clergy, family, and friends all hear about the affair. Because they are not in the fog, they see the affair for what it really is: the cruelest, most devastating, and selfish act anyone can ever inflict on a spouse. With so many people seeing the situation logically and not emotionally, the unfaithful spouse has an opportunity to be advised and influenced by these people. Furthermore, the betrayed spouse gains support when he or she needs it the most. ~ Willard F. Harley Jr.

I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed, while my dearest friends have been knocked down or have fallen into a gutter somewhere out in the cold night. I get frightened when I think of close friends who have now been delivered into the hands of the cruelest brutes that walk the earth. And all because they are Jews! ~ Anne Frank

We can be cruelest to those who remind us of ourselves." "Ty ~ Cassandra Clare

A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all. ~ Honore De Balzac

My name is Toy, Master!"
I slash her breasts with the whip. "Louder!"
"My name is Toy, Master!"
I keep whipping her until the front of her body from tits to crotch is livid red. I make her rasp out her submission again and again, until her voice is hoarse and it's agony for her, and then I make her scream it some more.
Then I do the cruelest thing I've ever done. Far crueler than the whipping.
I break my rule and I lie to her. It's necessary. She needs this is as much as I do; she just can't appreciate it. She can't hold on to hope anymore. That hope, it's harming her. It's making her do foolish things.
Things that might make me kill her.
And I don't want to have to kill her ~ Ginger Talbot

The weakest are always the cruelest,
in the end. ~ Megan Derr

Man is the cruelest animal," says Zarathustra. "When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights, crucifixations he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on Earth. And when he invented Hell ... lo, Hell was his Heaven on Earth"; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases. ~ Erik Erikson

Life can be at its cruelest with love and dreams. But of course they keep most of us going. ~ Robert Black

Few boys have been as fortunate as I, raised into manhood with only the gentlest of words and blandishments in my ears and the kindest of caresses upon my person, by a mother who sheltered us from everything that is harsh and ugly in this world. I was spoiled, utterly unprepared for cruelty, and perhaps this sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm not! You mustn't think I blame you. I'm afraid I must sound like the most ungrateful son in the world, when in fact the opposite is true. I am more grateful now than ever for the way you raised us, teaching us the value of kindness, of education, of independent thinking and liberal ideals, in the face of the fascism that is sweeping our country. The cruelest punishments now fail to bring even a tear to my eye, but the thought of the hardship you've suffered on behalf of your ideals makes me weep like a baby. ~ Ruth Ozeki

Lying about anything is the cruelest thing in the world you could ever do. Be who you are. Don't try to be someone you're not. It never works. ~ Summer Glau

In running it is man against himself, the cruelest of opponents. The other runners are not the real enemies. His adversary lies within him, in his ability with brain and heart to master himself and his emotions. ~ Glenn Cunningham

Sometimes family was the cruelest form of love there was, for no one could hurt you more than the people who created you. ~ S.C. Stephens

If T. S. Eliot had stayed in St Louis, he would never have held that April was the cruelest month. Well, unless he was a Browns fan.

At this moment, in the ragged middle of February, it begins: beneath the snow, roots quicken. In the Deep South, already trees begin to bud. And all over the land – indeed, all over the world, in Japan, in the Caribbean, in Australia – a certain class of mammal, fubsy, amiable, sweet-natured, begins to twitch and wake from hibernation: the baseball fan. Is it the lengthening of the days? Is it some subtle signal that causes them to begin to emerge from a stupor only lightly disturbed by meetings of the Hot Stove League? Naw. It is the magic phrase, 'pitchers and catchers to report…. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

ALS is, in my opinion, the cruelest disease. At least with cancer, there's a glimmer of hope. You can come up with a game plan and you can fight. ALS is terminal. In all cases. Nobody has ever beaten ALS. I don't say this to be callous or melodramatic; indeed, I saw its effects up close. Worst of all, it affects only the body, so as people become progressively and inevitably more paralyzed, they are keenly aware of everything that is happening to them. Think about that: You are 100 percent aware of your own paralysis. The ~ Bryan Bishop

I love you, too, Ophelia. God, loving you is the cruelest, most unkind thing I can do to you, and yet I'm going to do it anyway. Do you know what that means?" I tried to look away again - I was buried under an avalanche of emotion, and I felt as though I would suffocate from it. Sully wouldn't let me hide from him, though. He ducked down, bending so our eyes were locked once more. "Loving you isn't me telling you something we both already know. It's waking up together every morning. It's making love, and arguing and fighting, and dealing with each other's shit. It's walking across hot coals for you. It's protecting you, and keeping you, and honoring you always. There's no half measure in this, okay? So you have to be fucking sure, because once we travel down this road together, there is no turning back. There is no good ol' college try. There's me, and there's you. Forever. This will change me, and it'll change you, too. It's a part of us already. Once we let it overtake us, there won't be any turning back. Is that what you want?" "Is it what you want?" I asked in a small voice. "Don't do that. Own your feelings. You don't need to know what I think before you can make up your mind. ~ Callie Hart

That's what you do. Whenever you get excited about something, you bounce all over him like he's some kind of trampoline. But Fletcher isn't springy like that - he just absorbs it. And you never see the dents you leave behind."

She sniffled, and this time she didn't try to hide it. That had to be one of the cruelest things Sean had ever said to her. She would never hurt anyone like that - especially Fletcher. "I don't leave dents. ~ Tamara Morgan

A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: "I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew."34 ~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

I get frightened myself when I think of close friends who are now at the mercy of the cruelest monsters ever to stalk the earth. And all because they're Jews. ~ Anne Frank

That can be the cruelest part of happiness--its tendency to disguise itself in boredom."
- Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses, title story ~ Marie-Helene Bertino

Pain was always cruel, but it was cruelest when it came to children. Sometimes she would see a child she recognized from a prior hospitalization, going through the admissions procedure. Crying not in the indignant frightened way first-timers cried, but weeping silently, as if grieving the inevitable separation and pain to come ~ Monica Starkman

Love is the cruelest myth of all. ~ Marie Hall

Some dark nights hide the cruelest of secrets. Such are the tales of the dark shadows hidden in that old castle in a distant land. The story of ages started with a classic; highlighting the infamous monster made out of a man. ~ Adhish Mazumder

Truly we are creatures of labor and suffering, and nothing for long. Labor and suffering, and the plain sight of our destiny is the cruelest thing of all. ~ Euripides

Children get dealt grossly unequal hands, but that is all the more reason to treat them equally in school, Chris thought. "I think the cruelest form of prejudice is ... if I ever said, 'Clarence is poor, so I'll expect less of him than Alice.' Maybe he won't do what Alice does. But I want his best." She knew that precept wasn't as simple as it sounded. Treating children equally often means treating them very differently. But it also means bringing the same moral force to bear on all of them, saying, in effect, to Clarence that you matter as much as Alice and won't get away with not working, and to Alice that you won't be allowed to stay where you are either. ~ Tracy Kidder

February was always the cruelest month for Hunter S. Thompson. An avid NFL fan, Hunter traditionally embraced the Super Bowl in January as the high-water mark of his year. ~ Douglas Brinkley

The pain is always bringing me a lesson. If I listen to the lesson when the pain is manageable, the pain won't get gargantuan and flatten me entirely, because I will have received the message at the center. I receive it as gently as I can, because the cruelest thing that I do to myself is try to push myself through an experience. ~ Bellamy Young

Tricking someone into grief is one of the cruelest tricks a person can play, ~ Veronica Roth

The cruelest affront is treating the person as exactly the person he is. We all long to be understood, but not for what we are. We long to be understood for what we might have been had all been for the best in the best of all possible worlds and, at the same time, to be forgiven for what we are. ~ Jo Coudert

The elementary school years can also be a source of shame. Children can be terribly cruel. Any gay or lesbian child is especially vulnerable to ridicule. A child with developmental deficits, deformities or who is overweight is also an easy target. Children will shame other children the way they've been shamed. And if a child is being shamed at home, he will want to pass the hot potato by shaming others. Children like to tease. And teasing is a major source of shaming. Teasing is often done by shame-based parents, who transfer their shame by teasing their children. Older siblings can deliver some of the cruelest teasing of all. I have been horrified listening to clients' accounts of being teased by older siblings. ~ John Bradshaw

Time is the cruelest force of all. ~ Cixin Liu

Love of God thus becomes the dominant passion of life; like every other worth-while love, it demands and inspires sacrifice. But love of God and man, as an ideal, has lately been replaced by the new ideal of tolerance which inspires no sacrifice. Why should any human being in the world be merely tolerated? What man has ever made a sacrifice in the name of tolerance? It leads men, instead, to express their own egotism in a book or a lecture that patronizes the downtrodden group. One of the cruelest things that can happen to a human being is to be tolerated. Never once did Our Lord say, "Tolerate your enemies!" But He did say, "Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you" (Matt. 5:44). Such love can be achieved only if we deliberately curb our fallen nature's animosities. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

My mother calls it the pretty hate.
It comes on you like a fever when someone you love up and leaves you with nothing but silence. You turn the hate on yourself as you cannibalize your heart while the rage burns through you and polishes your desperation into a diamond. It is one of the cruelest things in the world to do to another human being.
Don't do that. ~ Ava Ayers

Mae Tuck must never go to the gallows. Whatever happened to the man in the yellow suit, Mae Tuck must not be hanged. Because if all they had said was true, then Mae, even if she were the cruelest of murderers and deserved to be put to death--Mae Tuck would not be able to die. ~ Natalie Babbitt

The cruelest countries have the most laws. ~ Marty Rubin

The cruelest form of death, I have no doubt, is not physical death. Rather it is that public death which comes from the killing of ideas about God. ~ James V. Schall

The citizens of Buffalo, then a smallish lakeside town, embarked on a brief campaign, led by a local judge named Wilkeson, to clear their own eponymous riverway and so tempt the canal engineers to route the Erie Canal to a terminus nearby. Energetic lobbying, together with the clearance of the creek, evidently worked, for the engineers did eventually end their labors there, and the fact that more than a million people now still brave one of the country's cruelest climates (with roof-topping lake-effect snowfalls drowning the city each winter) to live in and around Buffalo is testimony to the wisdom of Judge Wilkeson and the city fathers of 1825 in doing all the persuading, as well as dredging and prettifying the banks of Buffalo Creek. ~ Simon Winchester

When two people love each other as we do, no one can come between them, no one," I said, amazed at the words I was uttering without preparation. "Lovers like us, because they know that nothing can destroy their love, even on the worst days, even when they are heedlessly hurting each other in the cruelest , most deceitful ways, still carry in their hearts a consolation that never abandons them." (p.191) ~ Orhan Pamuk

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since being shot by Booth was to have fallen into the hands of Carl Sandburg. ~ Edmund Wilson

I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world. ~ Nella Larsen

You who come after me, scribbling these Annals, by now realize that I shy off portraying the whole truth about our band of blackguards. You know they are vicious, violent, and ignorant. They are complete barbarians, living out their cruelest fantasies, their behavior tempered only by the presence of a few decent men. I do not often show that side because these men are my brethren, my family, and I was taught young not to speak ill of kin. The old lessons die hardest. ~ Glen Cook

As soon as teenage girls start to profess love for something, everyone else becomes totally dismissive of it. Teenage girls are open season for the cruelest bullying that our society can dream up. Everyone's vicious to them. They're vicious to each other. Hell, they're even vicious to themselves. It's terrible.

So if teenage girls have something that they love, isn't that a good thing? Isn't it better for them to find some words they believe in, words like the 'fire-proof and fearless' lyrics that Jacqui wrote? Isn't it better for them to put those words on their arm in a tattoo than for them to cut gashes in that same skin? Shouldn't we be grateful when teenage girls love our work? Shouldn't that be a fucking honor?

It's used as the cheapest, easiest test of crap, isn't it? If teenage girls love a movie, a book, a band, then it's immediately classified as mediocre shit. Well, I'm not going to stand for that. Someone needs to treat them like they're precious, and if nobody else is ready to step up, I guess it's up to us to put them on the path to recognizing that about themselves. ~ Mary Borsellino

Two of the cruelest, most primitive punishments our town deals out to those who fall from favor are the empty mailbox and the silent telephone. ~ Hedda Hopper

You are merely a child, and children are sometimes the cruelest of all. ~ Roshani Chokshi

You are a survivor, at times you may not yet experience it, but the fact is that the worst and the cruelest part of your life is over. ~ Patricia Dsouza

April is the cruelest month. ~ T. S. Eliot

The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves
that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, but one of outrageous fortune's cruelest agents as well. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Some of the cruelest men in the world were born with silver tongues. They could charm a bird right out of the sky, only to break its wings. And no men, nice or cruel, offer favors lightly - not strangers. Not to young women. Not without expecting something back in return. ~ Nenia Campbell

Any chance we can bypass the cruelest method of death and settle this over a game of cards? ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

The cruelest thing you can do to an artist is tell them their work is flawless when it isn't ~ Yahtzee Croshaw

You might be the cruelest person I've ever met," he said in a conversational tone.
"What?" I gasped.
"My first wife killed herself. Took me centuries to get over it and love again, yet you weren't going to mention that you might be compelled to slay yourself in front of me. ~ Jeaniene Frost

I lived in a big bunkhouse of thirty farm workers with Leroy, who was a stranger to me in many ways because he was always talking about unions and unity. But he had a way of explaining the meanings of words in utter simplicity, like "work" which he translated into "power," and "power" into "security." I was drawn to him because I felt that he had lived in many places where the courage of men was tested with the cruelest weapons conceivable. ~ Carlos Bulosan

Anyone who lives in Boston knows that it's March that's the cruelest, holding out a few days of false hope and then gleefully hitting you with the shit. ~ Stephen King

It was the cruelest irony that the man I despised, the man who tortured me from the front of the classroom three days a week, was the hottest fucking thing I'd ever seen. ~ Chanel Cleeton

He blamed psychopaths for the brutal excesses of capitalism itself, that the system at its cruelest was a manifestation of a few people's anomalous amygdalae. ~ Jon Ronson

The cruelest aspect of love ... is its inviolable integrity. ~ Rick Yancey

Is Hollywood the cruelest city in the world? Well, it can be. New York can be that, too. You can be a Broadway star here one night, and something happens, and out
nobody knows you on the street. They forget you ever lived. It happens in Hollywood, too. ~ Buster Keaton

[ ... ] even in the cruelest human being there can exist a flower of good. Maybe just the tiniest blossom, in need of water and sunlight, but a flower just the same. ~ Meg Cabot

The cruelest curse of the disease is also its most sacred promise: You will not feel this way forever. ~ Terri Cheney