The quality of being cruel and causing tension or annoyance

Usage examples of cruelty.

He amused me with the enumeration of all her adorable qualities, and of all the cruelties she was practising upon him, for, although she received him at all hours, she repulsed him harshly whenever he tried to steal the slightest favour.

It was the difference between the manners of Tewksbury and Tuscumbia, between being brought up amid the cruelties of the almshouse and the affectionate warmth of an upper-middle-class Southern home, between an Irish cultural heritage of black pessimism and hot hatred of patronizing rulers and the genial, self-confident outlook of a class that despite the Civil War was still master.

Carinus from the control of fear or decency, he displayed to the Romans the extravagancies of Elagabalus, aggravated by the cruelty of Domitian.

A stone-waller, a no-sayer, a cipher whose bumbledom was itself an act of cruelty.

This was due to the cruelty of the Princess Dowager and Lord Bute and this time the King could not be exonerated.

He could not exactly be called ugly in spite of his hangdog countenance, in which I saw the outward signs of cruelty, disloyalty, treason, pride, brutal sensuality, hatred, and jealousy.

His cruelty, which at first obeyed the dictates of others, degenerated into habit, and at length became the ruling passion of his soul.

Even harder was accepting that his harsh, domineering father had acted from genuine concern rather than casual cruelty.

Bob Humpty is running such a positive campaign, or we would tell you some pretty shocking things about Bill Dumpty and animal cruelty.

The catastrophic decline in the Indian population, partly because of Spanish cruelty, partly because of imported disease, affected the labour supply, while some 200,000 Spaniards may have emigrated to America during the sixteenth century.

The violence it does to nature, to thought, to love, to morals, its arbitrariness, its mechanical form, the wrenching exegesis by which alone it can be forced from the Bible,7 its glaring partiality and eternal cruelty, are its sufficient refutation and condemnation.

I have known all my life, the falseness in a hearty laugh, the envy and the malice in a jesting word, the naked hatred in a jeering eye, and all the damned, warped, poisonous constrictions of the heart--the horrible fear and cowardice and cruelty, the naked shame, the hypocrisy, and the pretence, that are masked there behind the full hearty tones, the robust manliness of the Hortons of this earth .

No, friends, I did not coin the word gomer, nor did I invent the cruelty toward those with that label.

Cecilia and Marina were two sweet rosebuds, which, to bloom in all their beauty, required only the inspiration of love, and they would certainly have had the preference over Bellino if I had seen in him only the miserable outcast of mankind, or rather the pitiful victim of sacerdotal cruelty, for, in spite of their youth, the two amiable girls offered on their dawning bosom the precious image of womanhood.

I was somewhat glad also to think that my pitiless persecutors might, on hearing of my condition, be forced to reflect on the cruelty of the treatment to which they had subjected me.