The popular distinction between 'constructive' and 'destructive' criticism is a sentimentality: the mind too weak to perceive in what respects the bad fails is not strong enough to appreciate in what the good succeeds. To be without discrimination is to be unable to praise. The critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or about art; he is saying 'see what a nice person I am.

Brigid Brophy

Categorized in : Art Strong Nice

I don't hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality, and moral choice - and that is precisely why we are under an obligation to recognize and respect the rights of animals.

Brigid Brophy

compassion rights animal

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

compassion fun mean

The person who kills for fun is announcing that, could he get away with it, he'd kill you for fun. Your...life may be of no consequence to anyone else but is invaluable to you because it's the only one you've got. Exactly the same is true of each individual deer, hare, rabbit, fox, fish, pheasant and butterfly. Humans should enjoy their own lives, not taking others'.

Brigid Brophy

butterfly may fun

I refuse absolutely to consign the whole male sex to the nursery. ... I obdurately insist on believing that some men are my equals.

Brigid Brophy

men believe sex

To argue that we humans are capable of complex multifarious thought and feeling, whereas the sheep's perception is probably limited by lowly sheepish perceptions, is no more to the point than if I were to slaughter and eat you on the grounds that I am a sophisticated personality able to enjoy Mozart, formal logic and cannibalism, whereas your imaginative world seems confined to True Romances and tinned spaghetti.

Brigid Brophy

personality sheep animal

In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition.

Brigid Brophy

play may art

To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers should have scanned so deeply into right and wrong and yet never noticed the immorality of slavery. Perhaps 3000 years from now it will seem equally incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our own oppression of animals.

Brigid Brophy

equality should-have animal

By the age of three ... I was already an addicted reader. I still crave daily immersion in experience other than my own; (it needn't be more pleasant, exciting or illuminating -- merely other) and I still fall into books as though into catalepsy.

Brigid Brophy

age book fall

"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

abuse compassion people

A medical profession founded on callousness to the pain of the other animals may eventually destroy its own sensibility to the pain of humans.

Brigid Brophy

pain may animal

The fact that there are bigger injustices and wrongs doesn't make it right to sacrifice an innocent monkey. It doesn't alter the case at all.

Brigid Brophy

monkeys sacrifice animal

The bullfighter who torments a bull to death and then castrates it of an ear has neither proved nor increased his own virility; he has merely demonstrated that he is a butcher with balletic tendencies.

Brigid Brophy

butchers fighter bulls

I don't myself believe that, even when we fulfil our minimum obligation not to cause pain, we have the right to kill animals.

Brigid Brophy

pain life death

To my mind, the two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the eighteenth century.

Brigid Brophy

mind two sex

The thriller is the cardinal twentieth-century form. All it, like the twentieth century, wants to know is: Who's Guilty?

Brigid Brophy

guilty century want

We Irish had the right word on the tip of our tongue, but the imperialist got at that. What should trip off it we trip over.

Brigid Brophy

tongue right-words should

I refuse to consign the whole male sex to the nursery. I insist on believing that some men are my equals.

Brigid Brophy