It was a rude, brutal and purposely ugly book. However, it was an honest book.

The truth can be a harsh and cruel reality.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence - to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.

To get up in the morning, in the fullness of youth, and open a book — now that’s what I call vicious!

Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.

There’s cruel, and then there’s downright evil.

It is a cruel atmosphere down there, cruel and ruthless.

That's poetic in its malevolence

This is what healing demands. Behavior that is hurtful, shameful, abusive, or demeaning must be brought into the fierce light of truth, and truth can be brutal.

The world of the favela today is much more cruel than when I was growing up there or even as I show it in my book…If I were to write about the way things are today, I would start the book with a pile of rubber tires, gasoline and someone being burned alive.

You use the phrase “brutal Rebels.” Don’t be cheated in that way. There are enough “brutal Rebels” no doubt, but we have brutal officers and men too. I have had men brutally treated by our own officers on this raid [to Lynchburg, Va.]. And there are plenty of humane Rebels. I have seen a good deal of it on this trip. War is a cruel business and there is brutality in it on all sides, but it is very idle to get up anxiety on account of any supposed peculiar cruelty on the part of Rebels. Keepers of prisons in Cincinnati, as well as in Danville, are hard-hearted and cruel.

It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.

When you are young, and beautiful, you can be very cruel.