A Quote by Brigid Brophy

"Sentimentalist" is the abuse with which people counter the accusation that they are cruel, thereby implying that to be sentimental is worse that to be cruel, which it isn't.

Brigid Brophy

Quote Topics

Abuse Accusation Counter Cruel Implying People Sentimental Thereby Which Worse

Quote Author

Brigid Brophy
English - Writer
June 12, 1929 - August 7, 1995

The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.

Christopher Isherwood

We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and he fear and dread and splendor and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course wonder is costly. You couldn't incorporate it into a modern state, beacuse it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshiped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory and pitiless.

Robertson Davies

War, which used to be cruel and magnificent has now become cruel and squalid.

Winston Churchill

No matter what your views are on abortion, the Eighth Amendment in the Constitution is a very cruel, cruel law which benefits no one.

Aisling Bea

Everyone is afraid of you and when folk are afraid of a person it usually means the person is cruel in some way, and I think you are cruel, Miss Marquess, but please don’t punish me for saying it. I think you know you’re cruel. I think you like being cruel. I think calling you cruel is the same as calling someone else kind. And I don’t want to run errands for someone cruel.

Catherynne M. Valente

Unnecessary noise is the most cruel abuse of care which can be inflicted on either the sick or the well.

Florence Nightingale

Experience proves that none is so cruel as the disillusioned sentimentalist.

William Ralph Inge

My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.

Ernest Hemingway

Bullfights are a very cultural thing. I know many people think it's cruel, but so many things are cruel. Hunting, the electric chair, wars. These are all cruel things as well.

Fernando Botero

The question we should be asking is not why people are sometimes cruel, or even why a few people are usually cruel (all evidence suggests true sadists are an extremely small proportion of the population overall), but how we have come to create institutions that encourage such behavior and that suggest cruel people are in some ways admirable-or at least as deserving of sympathy as those they push around.

David Graeber

No, I only think you cruel, as I said the other day. Maybe not intentionally cruel; but you seem to be forcing me into disclosures which can result in nothing; as if you would have me bare a wound for the pleasure of looking at it, without the intention or power of healing it.

Kate Chopin

A man has a very insecure tenure of a property which another can carry away with his eyes. A few months reduced me to the cruel necessity either of destroying my machine, or of giving it to the public. To destroy it, I could not think of; to give up that for which I had laboured so long, was cruel. I had no patent, nor the means of purchasing one. In preference to destroying, I gave it to the public.

Samuel Crompton

Whenever people say, 'We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, 'We must be realistic,' they mean they are going to make money out of it.

Brigid Brophy

If there's a 'Cruel Summer' then there's got to be a 'Cruel Winter,' right? That's all I'm saying.