Shirley Jackson Quotes

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

Violence is the ultimate human degradation.

As if you cut open a rag doll with a sill name, and found inside:Real intestines, real lungs, a beating heart and blood. A lot of hot, sticky blood.

A body came flying out and landed at my feet. At first I thought it was Billy so I picked him up. But when I saw it wasn't I dropped him back down.

I saw the horrible way that people could treat each other. That may be the saddest thing of all. I saw greed and anger and murder and a total lack of concern for human life. It was a wicked side of the human soul that I saw... and it saddened me to know that such a dark place existed.

Life is cruel and we do terrible things to each other.

For thousands to do to death a few hundreds is no bravery. It is worse than cowardice. It is unworthy of nationalism, of any religion.

Man is the only animal that is cruel. It kills just for the sake of it.

The most identifying trait of humanity is our abilty to be inhumane to one another.

At the beginning of the twentieth century barbarism can throw off its gentle disguise, and burn a man at the stake as complacently as in the Middle Ages.

One who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman.

The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved. The misfortune and inhumanity of the white man are having killed man somewhere.

I'm fascinated by the awful, awful things that human beings do to each other.

Well: the day is a poem but too much Like one of Jeffers's, crusted with blood and barbaric omens Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk's cry.

[Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

The pointless ferocities of intellectual life shock businessmen, who kill only to eat.

Nothing is so pregnant as cruelty; so multifarious, so rapid, so ever teeming a mother is unknown to the animal kingdom; each of her experiments provokes another and refines upon the last; though always progressive, yet always remote from the end.

An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty. Men who have practiced tortures on animals without pity, relating them without shame, how can they still hold their heads among human beings?

Cruelty and fear shake hands together.

There is no dignity for either the sufferer or the torturer

In other words, the barbaric acts carried out in this building were probably almost a matter of routine.

Cruelty is the highest pleasure to the cruel man; it is his love.

For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.

His perfect kingdom of killing, suffering and pain Demands devotion, atrocities done in his name.

Human nature will find itself only when it fully realizes that to be human it has to cease to be beastly or brutal.