Human Brutality Quotes

People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.

I've seen many men die right in front of me - so many in fact that I've become almost hardened to it. Having seen the worst that human beings can do to each other, the results of torture, mutilation and seeing someone blown to pieces by a bomb, you develop a kind of shell. But you had to. You had to. Otherwise, we would never have won.

To insult someone we call him 'bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

The Bible: a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind.

Men are as we have always known them, neither better nor worse from the hearts of rogues there springs a latent honesty, from the depths of honest men there emerges a brutish appetite - a thirst for extermination, a desire for blood.

The brutalization of humans by other humans never fails to get to me in some angry-making way. It shot up in me like an explosion.

The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

Animal life, sombre mystery. All nature protests against the barbarity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his inferior brethren.

People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.

Everything, everything in war is barbaric…But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.

Democracies in history always suffered from the necessity of uniting with much of the best in human nature a mass of ignorance and brutality lying at the bottom of all societies.

The show's writers had peppered the piece with words like "savage," "wild," and "animalistic." What bullshit. Show me the animal that kills for the thrill of watching something die. Why does the stereotype of the animalistic killer persist? Because humans like it. It neatly explains things for them, moving humans to the top of the evolutionary ladder and putting killers down among mythological man-beast monsters like werewolves. The truth is, if a werewolf behaved like this psychopath it wouldn't be because he was part animal, but because he was still too human. Only humans kill for sport.

Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.

As to the lynchings of negroes, by torture and burning alive, professing Christians in the South and West have emulated the horrible example of the Apaches, Comanches, and other Indian savages of a former generation

During times of stress, despair and frustration, people become increasingly irrational, and they do things which they never think they are capable of. And so we see hideous brutality perpetrated by the most gentle people

There is a savage beast in every man, and when you hand that man a sword or spear and send him forth to war, the beast stirs.

The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind - the lower animals.

The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of men.