Certainly the most destructive vice, if you like, that a person can have—more than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins—is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred’s a subset of self pity and not the other way around, “It destroys everything around it, except itself.”
—Stephen Fry
—from BBC 4 Interview