A form of self-deception. The phrase comes from Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), in which Blanche DuBois, with delusions of grandeur, has a destructive effect on her sister Stella’s marriage to Stanley Kowalski. Stanley rapes her, leading to her nervous breakdown, and commits her to a mental hospital. As the doctor leads her off, she says, “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” The phrase “kindness of strangers” occasionally appears in other contexts, as in “With no rain for a month, my garden depends on the kindness of strangers.” Sue Miller used it in her novel The Lake Shore Limited (2010). Talking about two characters in her play, the playwright said: “Well, you are not Jay . . . a guy who’s betraying his wife. And I’m not Elena. I’m not . . . dependent upon the kindness of strangers.”

To overwhelm with benevolence. The original saying was “to kill with kindness as fond apes do their young,” conjuring up the image of a large simian crushing its baby to death with too vigorous a hug. It appeared as a proverb in the mid-sixteenth century and was quoted in numerous sources thereafter. A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse is the title of one of Thomas Heywood’s best-known plays (1607). It was surely a cliché by the time Byron wrote (Letters and Journals, 1815), “Don’t let them kill you with claret and kindness.”

Sympathy, compassion. This expression, too, comes from Shakespeare. He used it in Macbeth (1.5), where Lady Macbeth tells her husband, “Yet do I fear thy nature. It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness” (to act as ruthlessly as he must in order to become king). Numerous writers have used the term, often to comment on the souring or curdling of that very milk, although one writer reports of one bishop meeting another and saying, “He had often heard of the milk of human kindness, but never hitherto had he met the cow” (E. M. Sneyd-Kynnersley, H.M.I., 1908).