Cardinal Richelieu Quotes

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

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

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

In rushed a Body of Hellhounds—not content with cutting him and stabbing him in several places, they drew a cord round his neck until his Tongue was forced out—It they cut off and three fingers of his right hand—Then they cut out his wife’s tongue and … with a case knife cut off her thumb and four of her fingers one after another. She I fear cannot recover. There was in the house a brother of hers about 14 years old … his tongue, those merciless Villains cut out and cut the calf of his leg with a sword.

You, unprovoked, put the English to the most unheard of and most barbarous massacre without respect of sex or age, that ever the sun beheld, and at a time when Ireland was in perfect peace.

We humans are a fairly barbarous bunch.

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

War is at its best barbarism.

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

The malignity and inhumanity of the Greek military authorities are undisguised.

The norm was to kill everyone who was kidnapped. And anyone kidnapped was tortured … torture didn’t always work. It left people too destroyed …Torture is eternal. It has always existed and always will. It is an essential part of the human being …. Not one innocent person passed through my hands.

The very word torture is a disgrace to the human race.

[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.

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.

He is, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized Nation

The atrocities committed on our wounded and prisoners by the "chivalry" of the South may excite not only horror, hut a wild fury of revenge. But our cause should not be stained with cruelty and crime, even in the name of vengeance.

Human beings can do some God-awful things to other human beings

The population of Belgium ... behaved in a diabolical not to say, bestial manner… They tormented the wounded, beat them to death, killed doctors and medical orderlies, fired secretly … on men harmlessly standing in the street… The King of Belgium has to be notified at once that since his people have placed themselves outside all observance of European custom … They will be treated accordingly

As heathens, the white people had been cruel enough, but as Christians, they were ten times more so. As heathens, they were not quite so audacious as to go and take vessel loads of men, women and children, and in cold blood, through devilishness, throw them into the sea, and murder them in all kind of ways. But being Christians, enlightened and sensible, they are completely prepared for such hellish cruelties.

The things I saw beggar description ... The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where there were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda".

The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can't neuter it.

Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.

This little piggy went to Hades This little piggy stayed home This little piggy ate raw and steaming human flesh This little piggy violated virgins And this little piggy clambered over a heap of dead bodies to get to the top

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.