Cruelty is indifference to suffering, and even pleasure in inflicting it. If this habit is supported by a legal or social framework, then it receives the name of perversion. Sadism can also be related to this form of action or concept.
Cruel ways of inflicting suffering may involve violence, but affirmative violence is not necessary for an act to be cruel. For example, if a person is drowning and begging for help, and another person is able to help, but merely watches with disinterest or perhaps mischievous amusement, that person is being cruel — rather than violent.
Read more about Cruelty: Usage in Law
Famous quotes containing the word cruelty:
“To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West-Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“Ever more blood, ever more torments! My cruelty is exhausted and yet cannot stop; I want to be feared, but I only provoke.”
—Pierre Corneille (1606–1684)
“If Americans could understand what a painful, searing experience it is when Negro children first begin to realize that the mere color of their skin is to be the source of a lifelong discrimination, it might do more to end our cruelty toward the Negro than all the preaching on justice and equality.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)