Quotes About Hypocrisy

The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.

What most men call their conscience is imaginary virtue switching left or right according to self-interest.

Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a 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.

If you are a politician who styles yourself as a model of family virtue but are having a secret affair, you have no right to expect it to remain secret.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

We might imagine that Jesus had many human faults. He failed most humanly, in my reckoning, when he killed the fig tree just because it didn't bear any figs for his breakfast; that was a disgraceful, bad-tempered thing to do, and to try and make a virtue of it by saying it was a demonstration of faith only made things worse.

Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised.

The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues - probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life - even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.

What innocence, may I ask, is being played here when it is known that this virtuous damsel has already got a dozen illegitimate children?

The person who talks most of his own virtue is often the least virtuous.

Our virtuous system is already corrupt. Does anyone seriously think that cabinet ministers or captains of industry or powerful officials wait in the same lines as the rest of us?

Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor I'll piss on 'em. That's what the Statue of Bigotry says

Of what use are good words to an evil heart?

Like the street his gallery was on, Fortin had an attractive front, hiding quite a foul interior. He was opportunistic. He fed on the talent of others. Got rich on the talent of others. While most of the artists themselves barely scraped by, and took all the risks.

He was like Pinocchio. A man made of wood, mimicking humanity. Shiny and smiling and fake. And if you cut into him you'd see rings. Circles of deceit and scheming and justification. It's what he was made of. That hadn't changed.

You can put perfume on a pig, but it still stinks!

perché si de' punir donna o biasmare che con uno o più d'uno abbia commesso quel che l'uom fa con quante n'ha appetito e lodato ne va, non che impunito? Sono fatti in questa legge disuguale Veramente alle donne espressi torti

It is amazing how you can look in a mirror your whole life and think you are seeing yourself clearly. And then one day, you peel off a filmy gray layer of hypocrisy, and you realize you've never truly seen yourself at all. I

It was possible, Trixie supposed, that everyone had two faces: Some of us did a better job of hiding it than others.

what's morally right is considered wrong...and what's morally wrong, you can get away with.

You know... how it feels to sit at a bar and not be judged- to just have a drink and let it all hang out. Why can't the church be more like that? Why can't you walk in and say, Oh, God, it's just you. Cool. I can be myself now. Not in a way that ignores our sins- but in a way that makes us accountable for them.

Go to a goddamn priest if you wanna be lied to. I've seen too many of your kind slip back inside to fool myself. If you wanna think you're a new man, hell, that's fine. But don't think you're looking any different in anyone else's mind.

It was the kind of talk that made me want to break off a limb and take to whacking her and that bunch of hypocrites across the back of the head.