The Cruel Sea 1952 - Ingrid Newkirk - Richard Dawkins - David Attenborough TV - Mark Twain - Christopher Hitchens - Thomas Paine - Adolf Hitler - Niccolo Machiavelli - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Immanuel Kant - Friedrich Nietzsche - Publilius Syrus - Honor de Balzac - Bertrand Russell - Andrea Dworkin - Tennessee Williams - G K Chesterton - Ivy Compton-Burnett - George Eliot - Martin Luther King - John Forster - Seneca - William Shakespeare - Mercy Otis Warren - Anna Sewell - Thomas Fuller - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - John Updike - Martin Amis - Oscar Wilde - Great Thinkers In Their Own Words TV - James Joyce - Robert Tressell - The Act of Killing TV - Timothy Wilson Summary of R v Brown - CIRP Summary of R v Brown - History’s Most Hated TV - Matthew Collings TV - House of Cards TV - Edmund Burke - Thomas Hardy TV - Kony 2012
Two ships and a handful of men. The men are the heroes. The heroines are the ships. The only villain is the sea. The cruel sea that man has made more cruel. The Cruel Sea 1952 starring Jack Hawkins & Donald Sinden & Denholm Elliott & John Stratton & Stanley Baker & Liam Redmond & Bruce Seton & Meredith Edwards & Virginia McKenna & June Thorburn & Megs Jenkins et al, director Charles Frend, captain’s commentary
All tyranny, bigotry, aggression, and cruelty are wrong, and whenever we see it, we must never be silent. Ingrid Newkirk
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature. To which I reply and say, ‘Well, it’s funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the Almighty, always quote beautiful things. They always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses.’ But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in West Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he’s five years old. And I reply and say, ‘Well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well.’ And now I find that baffling to credit a merciful God with that action. And therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing. David Attenborough, Life on Air
God’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn. Mark Twain, notebook 1898
The best minds will tell you that when a man has begotten a child he is morally bound to tenderly care for it, protect it from hurt, shield it from disease, clothe it, feed it, bear with its waywardness, lay no hand upon it save in kindness and for its own good, and never in any case inflict upon it a wanton cruelty. God’s treatment of his earthly children, every day and every night, is the exact opposite of all that, yet those best minds warmly justify these crimes, condone them, excuse them, and indignantly refuse to regard them as crimes at all, when he commits them. Your country and mine is an interesting one, but there is nothing there that is half so interesting as the human mind. Mark Twain, Letter from the Earth
It’s childish to blame God for things that are going wrong. It’s idiotic ... We don’t think that God designed us and the universe after all, and if he did, he did it with such cruel ineptitude. Christopher Hitchens v Mark Roberts, debate 2007
The planner must be either very capricious, really toying with his creation ... or very cruel and very callous or just perhaps very different, or some combination of all of the above. Christopher Hitchens, lecture 6th October 2009
Once you assume a creator and a plan it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well ... And over us to supervise this is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea. Christopher Hitchens v Tony Blair: Is Religion a Force for Good in the World? Debate 2010
Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. Thomas Paine
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine and murder. For the belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. And the Bible is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind. Thomas Paine
Cruelty impresses, people want to be afraid of something ... The masses need that. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Those cruelties we may say are well employed, if it be permitted to speak well of things evil, which are done once for all under the necessity of self-preservation, and are not afterwards persisted in, but so far as possible modified to the advantage of the governed. Ill-employed cruelties, on the other hand, are those which from small beginnings increase rather than diminish with time. They who follow the first of these methods, may, by the grace of God and man, find, as did Agathocles, that their condition is not desperate; but by no possibility can the others maintain themselves. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince chIII
People speak sometimes about the ‘bestial’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals. Immanuel Kant
This most humane of men in ancient times has a streak of cruelty. Friedrich Nietzsche
Man is the cruellest animal. Friedrich Nietzsche
To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle ... Without cruelty there is no festival. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Hom
Cruelty is fed not weakened by tears. Pubililius Syrus
Cruelty and fear shake hands together. Honor de Balzac
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell. Bertrand Russell
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays
Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognise indifference to human suffering as a fact. Andrea Dworkin
Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable, and the one thing I have never been guilty of. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche
Cruelty is perhaps the worst kind of sin; intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty. G K Chesterton
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 an injustice to comrades. G K Chesterton
Being cruel to be kind is just ordinary cruelty with an excuse made for it ... And it is right that it should be more resented as it is. Ivy Compton-Burnett, 1884-1969, Darkness and Day, 1951
Cruel necessity. Oliver Cromwell, re execution of Charles I
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside itself – it only requires opportunity. George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life
The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people. Martin Luther King junior
Is not the pleasure of feeling and exhibiting power over other beings, a principle part of the gratification of cruelty? John Foster, 1770-1843
All cruelty springs from hardheartedness and weakness. Seneca
Let me be cruel, not unnatural;
I will speak daggers to her, but use none. William Shakespeare, Hamlet III ii 420
I must be cruel, only to be kind. ibid. III iv 179, Hamlet to Queen
Unkindness may do much;
And his unkindness may defeat my life,
But never taint my love. William Shakespeare, Othello IV ii 159