Cruelty Quotations

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men.
Abraham Lincoln

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of humanity.
George Bernard Shaw

Cruelty to animals is one of the most significant vices of a low and ignoble people. Wherever one notices them, they constitute a sign of ignorance and brutality which cannot be painted over even by all the evidence of wealth and luxury.
Alexander Von Humbolt

The quiet conscience is the invention of the devil. No one of us may permit any preventable pain to be inflicted even though the responsibility for that pain is not ours. No one may shut his eyes and think that the pain which is therefore not visible, is non-existent.
Albert Schweitzer

You cannot do a kindness too soon, because you never know how soon it will be too late.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is as if life had said, "I am going to send you into a world of cruelty. I shall make you sensitive to pain, fear, heat, cold, hunger and starvation. In this world of cruelty, I shall make you defenseless. In addition, I shall strike you dumb." This is the kind of world that animals are born into.
Grace Johnson

All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
James Russell Lowell

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time will come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.
Albert Schweitzer

To close your eyes will not ease another's pain.
Chinese Proverb

The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation, and misery on this earth.
George Eliot

These birds and animals and fish cannot speak, but they can suffer, and our God who created them, knows their sufferings, and will hold him who causes them to suffer unnecessarily to answer for it. It is a sin against their Creator.
George Q. Cannon

Cruelty to dumb animals is one of the distinguishing vices of the lowest and basest of the people -- wherever it is found, it is a certain mark of ignorance and meanness.
Jones of Nayland

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of pity and compassion, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.
St. Francis of Assisi