Sentimentality allows us to congratulate ourselves on our own warmth and generosity of heart. Oscar Wilde said that sentimentality is the desire to have the luxury of emotion without paying for it. It turns the people on whom it is bestowed into objects. It attempts, often successfully, to disguise from them their own part in their downfall. It suggests solutions to problems that do not, because they cannot, work. Sentimentality is the ally of ever-expanding bureaucracy, for the more a solution doesn’t work, the more of it is needed.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.