Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

We humans are a fairly barbarous bunch.

Cannibals are not to be found in the wilds of America only, but are reveling on the blood of every living people

Some of our men cut off the heads of their enemies … others tortured them longer by casting them into flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city …. In the Temple and Porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to the knees and bridle reigns.

I know I am among civilized men because they are fighting so savagely.

If we know anything about man, it's that he's not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.

Men are beasts and even beasts don't behave as they do.

Humankind seems to have an enormous capacity for savagery, for brutality, for lack of empathy, for lack of compassion.

Atrocities are human nature - they don't have political beliefs, color, creed or anything like that. They just happen, it's human.

We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal.

No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.

Civilization is hideously fragile … there's not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

[Spaniards] made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babies from their mother’s breast by their feet, and dashed their heads against the rocks … They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords. They hanged Indians by thirteens, in honor and reverence for our Redeemer and the Twelve Apostles …. They burned the Indians alive …. All this did my own eyes witness.

They [the English] have not, it is true, taken into their own hands the hatchet and the knife, devoted to indiscriminate massacre, but they have let loose the savages armed with these cruel instruments; have allured them into their service, and carried them to battle by their sides, eager to glut their savage thirst with the blood of the vanquished and to finish the work of torture and death on maimed and defenseless captives.

Genocide is also women’s business. When given the ‘opportunity’, women too will engage in it, even the bloodiest aspects of it.

Everywhere the Bulgarians have passed, one sees only blood, dishonor and ruin. It is a refinement of cruelty which the imagination refuses to comprehend.

A great number of poor Protestants, especially of women and children, they pricked and stabbed with their skeans, pitchforks and swords, and would slash, mangle and cut them in their heads, breasts, faces, arms and other parts of their bodies, but not kill them outright, but leave them wallowing in their blood to languish, starve and pine to death

Tyranny has no need of arts or sciences, for its policy, which is very shallow and without any refinement, only consists in shedding blood.

Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.

In times of war, as everyone knows, who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable ... in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling "civilized?" And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.

The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large.

More blood! More blood!