Quotes About Vice

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

A child is a beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal, with possibilities of virtue and vice- but as yet unstained.

I prefer a pleasant vice to an annoying virtue.

It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?

There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.

Conservatives are often fond of La Rochefoucauld's famous aphorism that 'Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,' and so tend to downplay hypocrisy as a sin. But in the marketplace of ideas they champion, hypocrisy may yet turn out to be the deadliest - or costliest - of sins.

It will always be considered a praiseworthy undertaking to urge the most obstinate and incredulous to abide by the principles that impel men to live in society. There are, therefore, three distinct classes of vice and virtue: the religious, the natural, and the political. These three classes should never be in contradiction with one another.

Happiness lies neither in vice nor in virtue; but in the manner we appreciate the one and the other, and the choice we make pursuant to our individual organization.

For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.

The difference is too nice - Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice.

Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice; it whitens only the hair.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Because impudence is a vice, it does not follow that modesty is a virtue; it is built upon shame, a passion in our nature, and may be either good or bad according to the actions performed from that motive.

When virtue is at liberty, so to some extent is vice.

Every life is march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.

Virtue knows to a farthing what it has lost by not having been vice.

In this country, most people feel that being successful in their business is a virtue, not a vice, and once we begin to identify it as a vice, this country is going down.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.