"I said don't tear me up." — Mick Jagger

Photo: Man Ray

" [...] One kind of 'holy tear' defined by Church analysts is 'the tear of compassion.' This is Clinton’s tear. Humbly, he weeps not for himself but for the suffering voter. A second kind of 'holy tear' is the 'tear of love.' This is Dole’s you-feel-my-pain tear. Dole mists up when he thinks not about his wounds as such but about the people of the little provincial town who, when the wounds left him helpless, helped him. Clinton weeps when he listens, Dole when he speaks…."
— Nicholas Jenkins, quoted by Erin Overby (The New Yorker)
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"John Boehner's emotions nearly got the best of him late Tuesday night, as he addressed news that the GOP had taken majority control of the House of Representatives with a quivered lip, a quavering voice and perhaps a few tears. [...]
     Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that the emotional moment gave the man who is likely to become the next Speaker of the House the sniffles, especially considering his propensity for crying."
— The Huffington Post
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"Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) is not known for emotional displays, but started to cry Friday morning when he was asked to talk about his mother during a town hall forum here with an audience mostly of moms.
     'Well, first of all you'll get me all teary-eyed. Callista will tell you, I get teary-eyed every time we sing Christmas carols,' Gingrich said, beginning to lose his composure when asked by GOP pollster Frank Luntz about his mom, Kit Gingrich, who died in 2003 at age 77."
— The Huffington Post
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"Oscar Wilde, revolting against the sappiness of Victorian sentimental culture, wrote that 'one would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.' Aldous Huxley, too, was one of many who, from Dickens's heyday to the present, complained that his sentimentality was caused by a refusal to think, by 'overflow, nothing else.' Tears of truth, tears of tribute, tears of empathy, tears of devotion, tears as the ultimate mark of a sincere and truthful heart: these are not foreign to us; the basic ideas are still part of our culture of crying. But we also know that emotional life is more complex and less innocent than these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts would have us believe. And we also know about tears of humiliation, frustration, and manipulation—tears that have nothing to do with sincerity. [...]
     Given the source of the metaphor, the fact that crocodile tears mask other motives should not be surprising. When crocodiles fully extend their jaws to swallow a victim, the crocodile's lacrimal ducts are squeezed, and excess lubricating tears are produced. Real crocodiles' tears are in fact meaningless in emotional terms. Metaphorical crocodiles' tears are an emotional diversionary tactic, a kind of camouflage for metaphorical teeth."
— Tom Lutz, (Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears) The New York Times
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