“We have attempted to reduce all virtues to kindness. Plato rightly taught that virtue is one. You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues. If being cowardly, conceited, and slothful, you have never done a fellow creature great mischief, that is only because your neighbors welfare has not yet happened to conflict with your safety, your self approval, or ease. Every vice leads to cruelty. Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice leads through anger to cruelty. Most atrocities are stimulated by accounts of the enemies atrocities and pity for the suppressed classes when separated from the moral law as a whole leads by a very natural process to the unremitting brutalities of a rein of terror.”
Book:The Problem of Pain