The Cult of Sentimentality

“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith.

When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and the fumes of the gas chambers.”

?-Flannery O’Connor

"While the urgency we feel opens out on to a life in all its concreteness and completeness, we cannot stop in midstride to pamper ourselves with an emotional experience, which becomes only evasion and waste."

-Luigi Giussani

"When emotionality is permitted to spill over into the sphere of public policy, it is not likely that, except occasionally by chance, any good will come of it.

Sentimentality is the expression of emotion without judgment. Perhaps it is worse than that: it is the expression of emotion without an acknowledgment that judgment should enter into how we should react to what we see and hear. It is the manifestation of a desire for the abrogation of an existential condition of human life, namely the need always and neverendingly to exercise judgment.

Sentimentality is therefore childish and reductive of our humanity."

-Theodore Dalrymple