What's the difference between brutal and ruthless?

Brutal


Definition:

  • (a.) Of or pertaining to a brute; as, brutal nature.
  • (a.) Like a brute; savage; cruel; inhuman; brutish; unfeeling; merciless; gross; as, brutal manners.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The arrest of the Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent Jason Rezaian and his journalist wife, Yeganeh Salehi, as well as a photographer and her partner, is a brutal reminder of the distance between President Hassan Rouhani’s reforming promises and his willingness to act.
  • (2) The analysis of the causes of hunger current in the 1970's can be summarized somewhat brutally as follows.
  • (3) Their brutality seems to have been fairly even-handed, or if it wasn't, the men surely suffered enough not to be presented as the winners of the atrocity.
  • (4) It hasn't been so exposed to the brutal learning culture Scotland Yard has been through with cases like Stephen Lawrence and Victoria Climbié.
  • (5) My whole world was turned upside down by the brutality of it.
  • (6) The Florida senator said: “This simplistic notion that ‘leave Assad there because he’s a brutal killer, but he’s not as bad as what’s going to follow him’ is a fundamental and simplistic and dangerous misunderstanding of the reality of the region.” It’s unclear though how much the actual debate about policy between the two senators stood out from the political carnival surrounding them.
  • (7) "They have a retaliatory doctrine," Salah argued of the police, whose brutality was a major cause of Egypt's 2011 uprising , but who have become more popular after backing Morsi's overthrow.
  • (8) Comic writing can be a brutal, unforgiving business, yet it can produce great and multi-layered prose, combining comedy, pathos and satire.
  • (9) "It's horrible and brutal to be that far back and searching for those gears and they're not there," O'Hare admitted.
  • (10) The Shah's secret police – Savak – became increasingly brutal, ultimately detaining without trial and torturing tens of thousands of Iranian citizens.
  • (11) These are the first western depictions of our animals, and what they represent are the inception of the specific cultural politics which your nation forced on my continent, its land and its people with unhesitating colonial brutality.
  • (12) Coming shortly after the regime's successful third nuclear weapons test, Rodman's public declaration that he was Kim's "friend for life ", and the young premier's ability to parade his western visitors on state media, angered critics who argued that the country's ghastly poverty and brutal human rights violations were inadequately reflected.
  • (13) The pro-free-market newspaper soon fell victim to brutal market forces.
  • (14) Zhang Gaoping, 47, told state media that he and his nephew were subject to seven days of brutal interrogation before trial – sleep deprivation, starvation, cigarette burns.
  • (15) Onset is generally brutal, as in acute enteritis or an extradigestive infection (ENT...) but persists, or else, more often, the syndrome appears insidiously over several days.
  • (16) As the brutality of the crackdown increased, there were reports of some small-scale defections within the Syrian army.
  • (17) Police said the brutal injuries to the boy clearly caused his death and investigators were not looking for anyone else.
  • (18) If so, they will be more jihadist, sectarian, brutal and anti-western when they take Damascus.
  • (19) Concentrate on the way he constructs the space of an interior or orchestrates a sensual camera movement that he invented himself - the camera gliding on unseen tracks in one direction while uncannily panning in another direction - and you perceive how each Dreyer film almost brutally reconstructs the universe rather than accepting it as a familiar given.
  • (20) Everything that was, is more: brutality, injustice, poverty, anger; but also clarity, knowledge, understanding and, possibly, determination.

Ruthless


Definition:

  • (a.) Having no ruth; cruel; pitiless.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) AB InBev has cut costs ruthlessly as it has bought up companies around the world, including Anheuser-Busch, the brewer of US beer Budweiser.
  • (2) As Greece pleads with its eurozone creditors for more time in meeting its fiscal adjustment targets, Dombrovskis is a fierce champion of surgical austerity applied quickly and ruthlessly.
  • (3) Rather than ruthlessly efficient, I have found them sweet and a bit hopeless."
  • (4) This thread ran through his later writings, which focused particularly on questions of the transformation of work and working time, envisaging the possibility that the productivity gains made possible by capitalism could be used to enhance individual and social life, rather than intensifying ruthless economic competition and social division.
  • (5) "Sometimes a handshake is just a handshake, but when the leader of the free world shakes the bloody hand of a ruthless dictator like Raúl Castro , it becomes a propaganda coup for the tyrant," said Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican Congress member in Florida, told the US secretary of state, John Kerry.
  • (6) But Hilton insists critics are wrong to see the group as ruthless youngsters who meet purely to further their own careers.
  • (7) This is how powerful a hold it has over them.” Mossino, who works with refugees and asylum seekers as well as victims of trafficking, says that in the past decade the trade in Nigerian women has become a hugely profitable and ruthless criminal industry, controlled largely by Nigerian gangs that took root in Italy in the 1980s.
  • (8) On 12 September 1980, the head of the military, Kenan Evren, sent tanks rolling through the streets of the Turkish capital and installed a ruthless military government.
  • (9) The "consultation" and "informed consent" the reports insist must take place before the project goes ahead are a sick joke in a region in which dissent is ruthlessly crushed and people are imprisoned and tortured simply for speaking their own language.
  • (10) She is also waiting to hear if she has won a second Olivier award, this time for her role as the ruthless Hollywood agent in The Little Dog Laughed, the play that transferred from Broadway to the West End last year.
  • (11) A boss on some astronomic pay packet may be held back by shame from paying his cleaners too little relative to that, but emotion will not get in the way of ruthlessness if the process all takes place behind the veil of some corporate contract.
  • (12) "What is clear is that they are as ruthless as any Islamist group or terrorists anywhere in the world," said Antony Goldman, a west Africa risk analyst at London-based PM Consulting.
  • (13) The often confusing circumstances that led to their courts martial and the ruthlessness of their punishments only fully came to light with the publication in 1989 of Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes's history Shot at Dawn .
  • (14) If there was reason to be worried following five successive defeats, their worst run of the century, they showed no sign of panic during a ruthless attacking performance which guarantees they will spend Christmas in the top six.
  • (15) She was ambitious, and Colonel Gaddafi has always promoted ruthless people.
  • (16) Every couple of years, evidence emerges to underline the unparalleled nature of the state onslaught and ruthless rule-breaking to overcome resistance in the mining communities, bought at a cost of £37bn in today's prices .
  • (17) The footage underscores the ruthlessness of fighting in Pakistan's border areas, where the army has also faced allegations of massacres.
  • (18) Philip French championed Boyle's career from the outset, describing his debut feature film, Shallow Grave , as "a good piece of storytelling... Hitchcock would have admired its ruthlessness and cruel humour."
  • (19) In the past decade, European migration was used as a sort of 21st-century incomes policy in Britain as employers ruthlessly exploited migrant labour to hold down wages – which have since been cut in real terms for four years in a row as a result of the crisis.
  • (20) But we can all probably do without Fifa's "fair play in marketing" lectures, which clothe commercial ruthlessness in the language of sporting decency, apparently oblivious to the impression given by wallpapering every stadium with signs that push BP or declare "We proudly accept only Visa".