PILLORY, n. A mechanical device for inflicting personal distinction -- prototype of the modern newspaper conducted by persons of austere virtues and blameless lives. - Ambrose Bierce
Puritanism...helps us enjoy our misery while we are inflicting it on others.
And that's just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real. - Paul Krugman
It is the nature of human that we tend to pass our pain along. As if we could get rid of it by inflicting an equal hurt on someone else. - Robin Hobb
There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency—which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours—to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm. - Nathaniel Hawthorne