Now narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyra...nnizing cruelly or beneficently over others; they go the way their nature guides them. Add to this the guidance of interest, and you will have the key to most social riddles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, pa...rtly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which me...n sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I ... would rather be in dependance on Great Britain, properly limited, than on any nation upon earth, or than on no nation. But I... am one of those too who rather than submit to the right of legislating for us assumed by the British parliament, and which late experience has shewn they will so cruelly exercise, would lend my hand to sink the whole island in the ocean.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why is it that writers, who by definition operate by the use of their imaginations, are given so little credit for it: we "make th...ings up." This is our trade. I remember, before I myself attempted this genre of space fiction, reading an agreeable tale about a species of highly intelligent giraffes who travelled by spaceship from their solar system to ours, to ask if our sun was behaving cruelly to us as theirs had recently taken to doing to them. I remember saying to myself: Well, at least the writer of this tale is not likely to get industrious letters asking what it is like to be a giraffe in a spaceship.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and reason, as the worst of all the vices. But then I am so soft in this that I cannot see ...a chicken's neck wrung without distress, and cannot bear to hear the squealing of a hare between the teeth of my hounds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren.... Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »