Pitiless

Zoology, he said, and those sciences which deal with man, continually insist upon what they call the pitiless law of struggle for existence. ❋ Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin (1881)

Whatever His aim, it had been past expression pitiless of Him, Him who had at His command thousands of pleasanter ways in which to help her, thus to drive a poor unhappy girl to extremities: one, too, whose petition had not been prompted by selfish ends alone. ❋ Unknown (2003)

The silence of gloom is merciful, shrouding one as with protection and breathing a thousand intangible sympathies; but the bright White Silence, clear and cold, under steely skies, in pitiless. ❋ Unknown (1900)

Before that, Amory was known as a pitiless, tart-penned TV critic for TV Guide and quick-witted essayist for Parade. ❋ Unknown (2009)

Yet put them together with a kind of pitiless precision and gleeful tendency to turn every downer into a music rave-up, and you've got yet another entry in what has become a really impressive body of work. ❋ Unknown (2010)

Cuba has suffered fifty years of the kind of pitiless collective punishment that Gaza has been experiencing, just in slower motion. ❋ Unknown (2009)

The author of a soon-to-be-published translation may find it awkward to criticize a just published translation of the same work, but in the present case I can, and should, master my embarrassment; for something must be done, some lone, hoarse voice must be raised, to defend both the helpless dead poet and the credulous college student from the kind of pitiless and irresponsible paraphrast whose product [*] I am about to discuss. ❋ Nabokov, Vladimir (1964)

Nor did pro-Israel activism come easy in the early 1990s, when a "pitiless" Yitzhak Rabin expelled 415 Islamic fanatics to southern Lebanon; international pressure eventually forced him to rescind the move, setting the stage for the flowering of Hamas. ❋ Unknown (2010)

Indeed, even the most enthusiastic advocates of the regnant Party-state blather inanities and bromides when confronted with the kind of pitiless political and intellectual censorship as evinced in the case of Liu Xiaobo. ❋ Unknown (2010)

Would Rex Murphy, squeezed into 18th-century breeches and sent by time machine to the Bois Caïman, have happily pledged his life to the destruction of the "pitiless" "white men's god"? ❋ Unknown (2010)

"pitiless" struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle which man must submit to as well, under the menace of otherwise succumbing in a world based upon mutual extermination. ❋ Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin (1881)

The moon cast a wicked glow on the frozen land and her pitiless face. ❋ Joe Tripician (2011)

Given the number of besieged and battered cities there have been in however many thousands of years of pitiless warfare there is only one explanation for this invocation of Warsaw before any of those – it is to wound Jews in their recent and most anguished history and to punish them with their own grief. ❋ Not A Sheep (2009)

Overlook Mr. Fry is pitiless on the subject of his young self, but he's also wry and tender and hilarious. ❋ Cynthia Crossen (2012)