Sentimentality Quotes - page 3
There is much sentimentality in the fourteen Points of Wilson's peace program. As far as we are concerned the question of Alsace-Lorraine is one that we cannot discuss and it cannot even be raised at any international conference. The territorial integrity of Turkey must be maintained. The Reich Chancellor has declared that we do not seek the annexation of Belgium. However, the Flemish movement is working for independence. The Reich Government should make it its task to support this movement. With regard to the question of self-determination...it must be remembered that there is no political education in Lithuania and that from seventy to eighty per cent. of the population there is illiterate...[Poland does] not need freedom.
Gustav Stresemann
If faith and hope were integral to National Socialism, so too, surprisingly enough, was charity. This ceased to be an uncomplicated reflection of human altruism, still less something individuals do discreetly for the good of their souls, or to reap tax exemptions and titles. Instead, it became a favoured means of mobilising communal sentimentality, that most underrated, but quintessential, characteristic of Nazi Germany.
Michael Burleigh
All art that is expressive has to be illusionistic. The raw material out of which art is built is not necessarily in itself potent; you must transform it. Contours, tactility, touch, color, intervals, that's all part of the concreteness of art. You have to make the concreteness expressive. That way you don't cater to taste. You resist sentimentality. Things in a picture can't remind you too much of anything else. You have to resist all that.
Kenneth Noland
[Cubitt hurling insults at Pinky after he refuses to lend him money] The picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ, the image of their own sentimentality. ...He was like a professor describing to a stranger some place he had only read in books:...when all the time it was a country the stranger knew...
Graham Greene
To make up for its lack of a moral compass, the British public is prey to sudden gusts of kitschy sentimentality followed by vehement outrage, encouraged by the cheap and cynical sensationalism of its press. Spasms of self-righteousness are its substitute for the moral life.
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
The charge of "sentimentalism" is frequently brought against those who plead for animals' rights. Now "sentimentalism," if any meaning at all can be attached to the word, must signify an inequality, an ill balance of sentiment, an inconsistency which leads men into attacking one abuse, while they ignore or condone another where a reform is equally desirable. That this weakness is often observable among "philanthropists" on the one hand, and "friends of animals" on the other, and most of all among those acute "men of the world," whose regard is only for themselves, I am not concerned to deny; what I wish to point out is, that the only real safeguard against sentimentality is to take up a consistent position towards the rights of men and of the lower animals alike, and to cultivate a broad sense of universal justice (not "mercy") for all living things. Herein, and herein alone, is to be sought the true sanity of temperament.
Henry Stephens Salt
In his effort toward revivification of this sense [the sense for great art], the modern artist has not infrequently retired into himself; he has accepted isolation or even alienation. ... Sometimes the good has to go underground. ... The "revolutionary” artist ... has had the aim of saving himself from the surrounding forces of sentimentality and vulgarity. ... It is impossible to make a deal with these forces, and we should not be surprised if in striking back the artist has done so in ways even intended to be offensive. He has sometimes shown defiance and contempt toward those who would deny his level of seriousness.
Richard Weaver
The young come to us creatures of imagination and strong affection; they want to feel, but they don't know how-that is to say, they do not know the right objects and the right measures. And it is entirely certain that if we leave them to the sort of education obtainable today for extra-scholastic sources, the great majority will be schooled in the two vices of sentimentality and brutality. Now great poetry, rightly interpreted, is the surest antidote to both of these. In contrast with journalists and others, the great poets relate the events of history to a pure or noble metaphysical dream, which our students will have all their lives as a protecting arch over their system of values.
Richard Weaver
Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity. That light is both the light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion. Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word "love” is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite. Truth frees charity from the constraints of an emotionalism that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a fideism that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space.
Pope Benedict XVI
