Honore de Balzac Quotes

It's terrible when the weak are also cruel for then we are defenseless against them.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

Give the peasants neither life nor death.

The cruelties committed against the Hottentots exceed everything that is said about it in Cape Town or what can be imagined.

One man's beard is on fire, and another man warms his hands on it.

The rights of human nature are deeply wounded by this infamous practice.

… these English masters who, after placing me in a position which forced me to get down on my knees and elbows to eat, are now depriving me of food and light and giving me chains and a Bible. I am not complaining of the penalties which my masters inflict on me -- it is my job to suffer -- but I insist that I have the right to inform the world of the treatment to which I am subjected

Cruelty isn't softened by tears; it feeds on them.

People been killing each other since forever and hurting each other since forever and taking advantage of each other since forever.

Experience proves that those are oftenest abused who can be abused with the greatest impunity. Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest.

I find that truly heartbreaking that, like, it's such a common, constant thing in people's lives - a brutal abuse of people by other people, and it's just accepted.

This is what it means to be a slave; to be abused and bear it; compelled by violence to suffer wrong.

How many, even of the better sort, would choose to be slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and tyrannical rule over all below them?

Guys like the Monarch are not unique, and there are guys like him all over the world torturing dumb scientists.

I would say that it's wrong to milk someone's misery.

I think it's a dangerous thing for anyone to have power over other people.

Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humilation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for-the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.

I tattered their wings and tore off their legs, joint by joint, watched them crawl in circles, like little lost infants, untill they decide to die.

The great put the little on the hooke.

The savages are upon me and I feel my flesh burn beneath the teeth of their indifference.

The profound immoralities of our time are cruelty, indifference, injustice and the use of others as means rather than ends in themselves.

Religion cruelly exploits our need to feel connected.

The advantage of beating a mute is he can't tell on you.

Man preys on man; and you mourn for the idle tapestry that decorated a gothic pillar, and the dronish bell that summoned the fat priest to prayer. You mourn for the empty pageant of a name, when slavery flaps her wing, ... Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a hell beyond the grave? - Hell stalks abroad; - the lash resounds on the slave's naked sides; and the sick wretch, who can no longer earn the sour bread of unremitting labour, steals to a ditch to bid the world a long good night.

The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.