Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.

Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.

Sentiment is intellectualized emotion; emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy

Hildegard had long felt that sentimentality was a luxury she could not afford.

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.