Quotes About Vice

Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.

Part of the problem about authenticity is that virtues aren't the only things that are habit forming: the more someone behaves in a way that is damaging to self or to others, the more "natural" it will both seem and actually be. Spontaneity, left to itself, can begin by excusing bad behavior and end by congratulating vice.

Simplicity is a great virtue, but oversimplification can actually be a vice, a sign of laziness.

Barry Goldwater famously argued that extremism in the defense of liberty was no vice. Our story will show that it is.

It is not true that men never change; they change for the worse, as well as for the better. It is not true they are ungrateful; more often the benefactor rates his favors higher than their worth; and often too he does not allow for circumstances. If few men have the moral force to resist impulses, most men do carry within themselves the germs of virtues as well as of vices, of heroism as well as of cowardice. Such is human nature — education and circumstances do the rest.

Envy differs from the other vices by the ease with which it disguises itself as a virtue.

The ability to consume pornography is the distinctive characteristic of the imbecile.

Beauty works perfect miracles. All inner shortcomings in a beauty, instead of causing repugnance, become somehow extraordinarily attractive; vice itself breathes comeliness in them; but if it were to disappear, then a woman would have to be twenty times more intelligent than a man in order to inspire, if not love, at least respect.

In effetti la pietà non ci assale mai così violentemente come alla vista della bellezza toccata dal soffio corruttore del vizio. Ancora ancora gli si accompagnasse la deformità, la bellezza, la tenera bellezza... nei nostri pensieri si unisce soltanto all'innocenza e alla purezza.

All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.

Nor is there on earth a more powerful advocate for vice than poverty.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

Thus, my children, after men have travelled through a few stages in vice, shame forsakes them, and returns back to wait upon the few virtues they have still remaining.

There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence, that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue.

Thus a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices. ST. AUGUSTINE, CITY OF GOD

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." Rochefoucauld's maxim

Today's liberal democracy, with its culture of transgression, its drive to liberate anything and everything done by and between consenting adults, and its mania for management by metrics, appears bent on adding to history's examples of societies that failed to manage vice and the crooked timber of our humanity.

Actions punishable by jail sentences are not the only crimes. If we knew the antonym of crime, I think we would know its true nature. God . . . salvation . . . love . . . light. But for God there is the antonym Satan, for salvation there is perdition, for love there is hate, for light there is darkness, for good, evil. Crime and prayer? Crime and repentance? Crime and confession? Crime and ... no, they're all synonymous. What is the opposite of crime?

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

And death is a thing much cleaner than vice.

It is the business of a virtuous clergy to censure vice in every appearance of it.

he said "Miami" left the impression of Sodom-by-the-Sea.

Added to residential segregation was the powerlessness of blacks to keep vice out of their communities.

Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice.