Quotes About Vice

What we call a vice is actually an inability to recognize what has the greatest value.

Yet malice never was his aim;He lash'd the vice but spar'd the name.No individual could resent,Where thousands equally were meant.His satire points at no defectBut what all mortals may correct;For he abhorr'd that senseless tribeWho call it humor when they gibe.

As nations become corrupt and vicious," he says, "they have more need of masters." The root of the word "vicious" is "vice"—the word simply means "full of vice." So Franklin, without feeling the need to explain himself much, is bluntly saying that "freedom requires virtue." And that less virtue inevitably begets less freedom. In

The newspaper man, listening, thought, "An infant gone mad with her dolls. Or no, vice has lost its humanness. She's the symbol of new sin—the unhuman, passionless whirligig of baby girls and baby boys through the cabarets.

Whilst that for which all virtue now is sold,And almost every vice—almighty gold.

Ashenden admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness," wrote Maugham.

It is a great vice for any constitution to leave to powerful men no alternative between their own power and the scaffold.

The second vice is lying; the first is running in debt.

What maintains one vice would bring up two children.

How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

To all pimps and whores a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea.

The colonel had a single vice—whiskey—and he looked forward to the anesthetic burn of the Kentucky bourbon with sublime anticipation.

Sin is a measure of evil.

The greatest moral failing is to condemn something as a moral failing: no vice is worse than being judgmental.

No one ever reached the worst of a vice at one leap.

Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.

Inte stort dugde han till: han hade mest av allt lust att sova och äta, och därnäst tyckte han om att ställa till odygd.

If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion; the love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes, and I shall become a thing of whose existence every one will be ignorant. My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of existence and events, from which I am now excluded.

My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal.

To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm.

To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased, and I turned away with disgust and loathing.

My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and, when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine.

Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of bringing forth. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now vice has degraded me beneath the meanest animal.

To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake—and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.