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Vice
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Published Monday, June 13, 2016 @ 8:11 PM EDT
Jun 13 2016

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
-G.K. Chesterton

A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice.
-Thomas Paine

A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.
-Theodore Roosevelt

A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common.
-W.H. Auden

Early rising may not be a vice... but it is certainly no virtue. The old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.
-Edith Sitwell

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.
-Marquis de Sade

Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.
-David Hume

Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn't amount to much.
-Peter Ustinov

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.
-W. Somerset Maugham

I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice.
-Michel de Montaigne

I prefer an accommodating vice
To an obstinate virtue.
-Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)

I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.
-Albert Einstein

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
-Barry M. Goldwater

In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.
-W.H. Auden

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
-James Fenimore Cooper

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?
-John Quincy Adams

It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.
-Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.
-Marcel Proust

More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.
-Robert Smith Surtees

My only aversion to vice is the price.
-Victor Buono

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.
-Angela Carter

Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar; and the drunkard who's the benefactor of the whole city.
-Thornton Wilder

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

Our age is an age of moderate virtue
And moderate vice.
-T.S. Eliot

Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.
-Francis Bacon

Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality. (1742)
-Henry Fielding

Religions which deprive the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
-Bertrand Russell

Sadness is a vice.
-Gustave Flaubert

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.
-Henry Adams

Some faults are so closely allied to qualities that it is difficult to weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue.
-Oliver Goldsmith

The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable; absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullnesses of it and the pomposities of it.
-Samuel Butler (Novelist, 1835-1902)

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
-Winston Churchill

The only vice which cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.
-William Hazlitt

The vice that underlies all vices is that we are held cheap by others, and far worse, that in our innermost soul we think cheaply of ourselves.
-Felix Adler

The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity.
-Oscar Wilde

There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.
-Henry Fielding

There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.
-Theodore Dalrymple

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

Vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination.
-Daniel Defoe

Vice is a creature of such hideous mien... that the more you see it the better you like it.
-Finley Peter Dunne

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen.
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
-Alexander Pope

Vice is its own reward.
-Quentin Crisp

Vice is nice
But a little virtue
Won't hurt you.
-Felicia Lamport

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
-George Bernard Shaw

Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
-Adam Smith

Were there no desire there would be no virtue, and because one man desires what another does not, who shall say whether the child of his desire be Vice or Virtue?
-Edgar Rice Burroughs

What does labor want? We want more school houses and less jails. More books and less guns. More learning and less vice. More leisure and less greed. More justice and less revenge.
-Samuel Gompers

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
-Benjamin Disraeli

What maintains one vice would bring up two children.
-Benjamin Franklin

Work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and poverty.
-Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)


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