Greg Iles Quotes

We humans are a fairly barbarous bunch.

We, as human beings, have the capacity for extreme cruelty.

When humans behave murderously, such as inflicting senseless slaughter of innocents in warfare, we like to blame it on some dark, 'animalistic' instinct.

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

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

Man is the cruelest animal.

"Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice." ... They have experienced secretly and privately their natural human impulse toward sadism and brutality... Not merely did I learn to kill with a noose of piano wire put around somebody's neck from behind, but I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing that way.

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.

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.

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

The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Exterminate all brutes.

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.

Every kind of atrocity was inflicted upon their captives. They hung up the noblest and best-looking women naked, cutting off their breasts and stitching them to their mouths, so that the women appeared to be eating them and after this they impaled them on sharp stakes, run up the body.

I find man's inhumanity to man extraordinary,,, I can't get my head around it.

The scariest monsters are human beings and what we will do to each other.

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.