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:
“I remember the almost daily talks of my mother on the cruelty of slavery. I would say nothing to her, but I was thinking all the time that slavery did not seem so cruel. Master and Mistress Jennings were not mean to my mother. It was she who was mean to them.”
—Cornelia (1844–?)
“There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)
“Of all the animals with which this globe is peopled, there is none towards whom nature seems, at first sight, to have exercised more cruelty than towards man, in the numberless wants and necessities with which she has loaded him, and in the slender means which she affords to the relieving these necessities.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)