People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.

This remark is commonly attributed to Dostoyevsky’s late novel *The Brothers Karamazov* (1879–1880), a work preoccupied with moral responsibility, suffering, and the problem of evil. The line fits the novel’s recurring contrast between instinctual animal behavior and distinctly human capacities—especially the ability to rationalize, aestheticize, and systematize violence. In the book, discussions of cruelty arise alongside accounts of brutality (including violence toward children and animals) used to probe whether human beings are uniquely capable of moral depravity precisely because they possess conscience, imagination, and intellect. The phrasing is often cited in English as a standalone aphorism rather than in its immediate narrative setting.

Dostoyevsky’s remark attacks the common habit of calling human cruelty “bestial.” Animals may kill or injure, but typically from instinct, hunger, fear, or territoriality; they do not refine suffering into a conscious project. The sting of the line is the claim that human beings can make cruelty deliberate, imaginative, and even aesthetic—turning harm into a kind of “art” through calculation, ideology, or pleasure in domination. The quote thus fits Dostoyevsky’s broader moral psychology: the most frightening aspect of humanity is not animal impulse but rationalized evil, carried out with intelligence and self-justification.