What's the difference between pitiless and ruthless?

Pitiless


Definition:

  • (a.) Destitute of pity; hard-hearted; merciless; as, a pitilessmaster; pitiless elements.
  • (a.) Exciting no pity; as, a pitiless condition.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) They fit with his continuation of the regime’s systemic human rights abuses, its pitiless prison labour camp system including enslavement, forced abortions and systemic rape, its abductions and foreign hostage-taking, and its aggressive defiance of its neighbours.
  • (2) The judge began sentencing for the "sickening and pitiless" attack by saying that Adebolajo and Adebowale were converts to Islam who became radicalised and extremists.
  • (3) A grand and sombre staircase - dark, looming, pitiless - leads up from the Axes to the exhibits, allowing Libeskind to play one last trick on the visitor by luring him up a final flight that goes nowhere, before his voice gives way to the memoranda of Jewish history.
  • (4) As Bellfield refused to come to the court from his prison cell, judge Mr Justice Wilkie described him as a "cruel and pitiless killer" who had "not had the courage to come into court to face his victims and receive his sentence".
  • (5) The pitiless tone of social media has made this sort of exercise even harder to manage than before.
  • (6) Levi Bellfield refused to leave his prison cell to hear Mr Justice Wilkie sentence him to life without parole and condemn him as a "cruel and pitiless killer".
  • (7) She’s pitiless with him, even with the polite hat doffing on managing the global financial crisis and projecting Australian interests through the G20.
  • (8) How does she survive on a pittance in that pitiless pandemonium?
  • (9) Your sickening and pitiless conduct was in stark contrast to the compassion and bravery shown by the various women at the scene who tended to Lee Rigby's body and who challenged what you had done and said.
  • (10) He added: "He is marked out as a cruel and pitiless killer."
  • (11) These stories are cut-glass beauties, pitiless and hard-edged and constantly poking fun at the pretensions of the middle and upper classes.
  • (12) Earlier the judge who sentenced "cruel and pitiless" Bellfield to life for her murder and kidnap dismissed the jury, which was still deliberating on allegations that Bellfield had tried to abduct another girl, Rachel Cowles, then 11, the day before Milly vanished.
  • (13) The most recent synopsis for The Hateful Eight suggests the film “follows the steadily ratcheting tension that develops after a blizzard diverts a stagecoach from its route, and traps a pitiless and mistrustful group which includes a competing pair of bounty hunters, a renegade Confederate soldier, and a female prisoner in a saloon in the middle of nowhere”.
  • (14) To suffer the humility of failing courage in face of pitiless terror.
  • (15) In the article, for French magazine L’Obs, the correspondent suggested China’s “pitiless repression” of the Uighurs was to blame for a tide of deadly violence around the country, including bomb and knife attacks on civilians.
  • (16) The towering historian of the left EP Thompson agreed with him, and conjured a pitiless elite of aristocratic Whigs, unrelenting in the exhibition of authority.
  • (17) A brilliantly learned man with a pitiless mind and a kind eye.
  • (18) Pallas Athena, the Greek god of wisdom, becomes, in Klimt's painting of her, a shining warrior with pitiless eyes: wisdom frozen into dogma.
  • (19) "Everywhere the same hard, grim, pitiless sign of battle and war.
  • (20) The environment of a group such as Islamic State, created around a cult of extreme violence and a worldview that dehumanises all outside the organisation, can quickly turn an individual from a misguided insurgent into a pitiless terrorist killer, more than happy to execute a defenceless hostage with a knife, on camera.

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".

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