Hypocrisy Quotes

I hope you have not been leading a double life pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

Oscar Wilde

Hypocrites do the devil's drudgery in Christ's livery.

Matthew Henry

Hypocrisy is the homage which vice renders to virtue.

La Rochefoucauld

Who stole the livery of the court of Heaven To serve the Devil in.

Frederick Pollock

He that hath the name to be an early riser may sleep till noon.

James Howell

Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.

La Rochefoucauld

We are not hypocrites in our sleep.

William Hazlitt

No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.

Samuel Johnson

The wolf was sick he vowed a monk to be - But when he got well a wolf once more was he.

Walter Bower

Remember this: If you work for a man in Heaven's name work for him. If he pays you wages which supply you bread and butter work for him speak well of him stand by the institution he represents. If put to a pinch an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness. If you must vilify condemn and eternally disparage - resign your position and when you are on the outside damn to your heart's content but as long as you are part of the institution do not condemn it.

Elbert Hubbard

For neither man nor angel can discern hypocrisy the only evil that walks invisible.

John Milton

The teeth are smiling but is the heart?

Congo proverb

Affectation is a greater enemy to the face than smallpox.

English Proverb

It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed or not possible to avoid making those that are required.

Ivan Goncharov

When you say that you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out.

Otto von Bismarck

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last.

Winston Churchill

There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has the right to blame us.

Oscar Wilde

Extremes meet and there is no better example than the naughtiness of humility.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hypocrite - mouth one way belly 'nother way.

Australian Aboriginal proverb

When the fox preaches look to your geese.

German Proverb

Reasons are whores.

Leonard Michaels

Saint abroad and a devil at home.

John Bunyan

Every man is a hypocrite

Frederick IV

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

Samuel Butler

Just as Napoleon was the sole authority in the state, so the husband and father was to exercise authority over his family. Unfortunately the only possible result of despotism on either level is hypocrisy.

J. Christopher Herold

When I see you, I think "I wonder which face she sees when she looks into the mirror.

C. JoyBell C.

Godliness is more easily feigned in words than in actions

Jonathan Edwards

Be not intimidated...nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.

John Adams

Nothing short of the end of the world would get our eco-conscious techies to toss their latest gadgets onto the street.

Susan Ee

It is under all circumstances an advantage to be in full possession of one's personality, otherwise the repressed elements will only crop up as a hindrance elsewhere, not just at some unimportant point, but at the very spot where we are most sensitive. If people can be educated to see the shadow-side of their nature clearly, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more self-knowledge can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.

C.G. Jung

But I knew the way the people in the town thought about things. They always had some time left over from their life to bother about other people and what they did. They thought they had to get together to help other people out, like the time they got together about the woman who let a colored man borrow her car and told her the best place for her was up north with all the other nigger lovers, and the time they got the veterans with overseas wives out. If you were different from anybody in town, you had to get out. That's why everybody was so much alike. The way they talked, what they did, what they liked, what they hated. If somebody got to hate something and he was the right person, everybody had to hate it too, or people began to hate the ones who didn't hate it. They used to tell us in school to think for yourself, but you couldn't do that in the town. You had to think what your father thought all his life, and that was what everybody thought.

John Kennedy Toole

* *Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.*Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.

George Orwell

Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.

Sigmund Freud

I thought Mr. Millward never would cease telling us that he was no tea-drinker, and that it was highly injurious to keep loading the stomach with slops to the exclusion of more wholesome sustenance, and so give himself time to finish his fourth cup.

Anne Brontë

Yet what moved Our Blessed Lord to invective was not badness but just such self-righteousness as this…He said that the harlots and the Quislings would enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the self-righteous and the smug. Concerning all those who endowed hospitals and libraries and public works, in order to have their names graven in stone before their fellow men, He said, “Amen I say to you, they have received their reward” (Matt. 6:2). They wanted no more than human glory, and they got it. Never once is Our Blessed Lord indignant against those who are already, in the eyes of society, below the level of law and respectability. He attacked only the sham indignation of those who dwelt more on the sin than the sinner and who felt pleasantly virtuous, because they had found someone more vicious than they. He would not condemn those whom society condemned; his severe words were for those who had sinned and had not been found out…He would not add His burden of accusation to those that had already been hurled against the winebibbers and the thieves, the cheap revolutionists, the streetwalkers, and the traitors. They were everybody’s target, and everybody knew that they were wrong…And the people who chose to make war against Our Lord were never those whom society had labeled as sinners. Of those who sentenced Him to death, none had ever had a record in the police court, had ever been arrested, was ever commonly known to be fallen or weak. But among his friends, who sorrowed at His death, were coverts drawn from thieves and from prostitutes. Those who were aligned against Him were the nice people who stood high in the community—the worldly, prosperous people, the men of big business, the judges of law courts who governed by expediency, the “civic-minded” individuals whose true selfishness was veneered over with public generosity. Such men as these opposed him and sent Him to His death.

Fulton J. Sheen

Unwell? I was fine, as good as one might feel in such circumstances. No, my friend, I merely pretended to faint. I'm a good actress. Actually, a thought had come into my mind: if a terrorist, I said to myself, were to blow up this church with all of us inside, at least one-tenth of all the hypocrisy in the world would disappear with us. So I had myself escorted out.

Andrea Camilleri

People who say, 'Let the chips fall where they may,' usually figure they will not be hit by a chip.

Bernard Williams

It's the deep, fundamental bedrock of hypocrisy upon which religion is founded. Consider: no creature can be said to worship if it does not possess free will. Free will, however, is FREE. And just by virtue of being free, is intractable and incalculable, a truly Godlike gift, the faculty that makes a state of freedom possible. To exist in a state of freedom is a wild, strange thing, and was clearly intended as such. But what to the religions do with this? They say, "Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and to us." The effrontery of it! God, who would not coerce a fly, is painted as a supreme slavemaster! In the fact of this, any creature with spirit must rebel, must serve God entirely of his own will and volition, or must not serve him at all, thus remaining true to himself and to the faculties God has given him.

Robert Sheckley

He who laughs worst, weeps first

Paul Haddad

...my mind was consumed with the idea of purdah. From behind it no call for help could be heard. An abandoned species was trapped in a forbidden world. Everything corrupt happened under the shroud, when it was off a faceless and nameless woman appeared.

Tehmina Durrani

It was the sixties, exactly, all we wanted to do was to smoke a lot of dope and ball a lot of chicks. Vietnam, excuse me? Why would I wanna go get my ass shot off in some stinking rice paddy just so Nixon can have his four more years? Screw that, and I wasn't the only one who felt that way. All the big warmongers these days who took a pass on Vietnam, look, I'd be the last person on earth to start casting blame. Bush, Cheney, Rove, all those guys, they just did what everybody else was doing and I was right there with 'em, chicken as anybody. My problem now is how tough and gung-ho they are, all that bring it on crap, I mean, Jesus, show a little humility, people. They ought to be just as careful of your young lives as they were with their own.

Ben Fountain

The increasingly cynical court thought Arthur, "hypocritical, as all decent men must be if you assume decency cannot exist.

T.H. White

But I am scared. Everybody's scared.""You know what I mean, like scared scared. Like coward scared, like if you never went to begin with. But with everything you've done nobody's going to doubt you." Then she made a somewhat frantic speech about a website she found that listed how certain people had avoided Vietnam. Cheney, Four education deferments, then a hardship 3-A. Limbaugh,4-F thanks to a cyst on his ass. Pat Buchanan, 4-F. Newt Gingrich, grad school deferment. Karl Rove, did not serve. Bill O'Reilly, did not serve. John Ashcroft, did not serve. Bush, AWOL from the Air National Guard, with a check mark in the "do not volunteer" box as to service overseas."You see where I'm going with this?'"Well, yeah.""I'm just saying, those people want a war so bad, they can fight it themselves. Billy Lynn's done his part.

Ben Fountain

Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat. Having himself no particular opinions or tastes he relied upon whatever conformed with those of his companion. He was as ready to drink tea at Fortnum's as beer at the Prospect of Whitby; he would listen to military music in St. James's Park or jazz in Compton Street cellar; his voice would tremble with sympathy when he spoke of Sharpeville, or with indignation at the growth of Britain's colored population. To Leamas this observably passive role was repellent; it brought out the bully in him, so that he would lead the other gently into a position where he was committed, and then himself withdraw, so that Ashe was constantly scampering back from some cul-de-sac into which Leamas had enticed him.

John le Carré

War hath no fury like a non-combatant.

Charles Edward Montague

Hypocrisy is when you get mad at a friend for telling their other friend a secret that your other friend told you.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood and then mount the stump to make a speech for conservation.

Adlai Ewing Stevenson

Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend!

Edith Wharton

I really wished he hadn't made me hate to read the Bible. Having it shoved down my throat all my life had made me bitter toward reading it. I believed it, but my dad had used it to his benefit too many times and ignored the parts in there that would point out his wrongs. Like judging Beau without even knowing him. That was in the Bible too.

Abbi Glines

I was more at home in my father's world. People like Mr. Heck Tate did not trap you with innocent questions to make fun of you; even Jem was not highly critical unless you said something stupid. Ladies seemed to live in faint horror of men, seemed unwilling to approve wholeheartedly of them. But I liked them. There was something about them, no matter how much they cussed and drank and gambled and chewed; no matter how undelectable they were, there was something about them that I instinctively liked... they weren't—"Hypocrites, Mrs. Perkins, born hypocrites," Mrs. Merriweather was saying.

Harper Lee

Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness

Herman Melville

Do not treat others as you would not like to be treated' frees one from hypocrisy. 'Treat others as you would like to be treated' enslaves one with insincerity.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Other than damnation I know no magic to satisfy your wishes; for ye believe one thing, desire another, speak unlike, act differently and obtain the living value.

Austin Osman Spare

As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy - how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbors any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of others. Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons - they virtually invented it all.

Arundhati Roy

The facts are always frightening, and in all of us fear of the facts is constantly at work, constantly being fuelled; but this morbid fear must not lead us to conceal the facts and so to falsify the whole of human history -- which is of course part of natural history -- and pass it on in falsified form just because it is customary to do so, when we know that all history is falsified and always transmitted in falsified form.

Thomas Bernhard

If ever you get invited into someone's home,' my father said (as he had been invited five or six times that morning), 'you go into the sitting-room and you say, “Oh, what an attractive room!" even if you think it's hideous.

Dick Francis

Agnes: "I have a question for you, speaking of truth. You say God speaks the truth." Tóti: "Yes." Agnes: "And God said: 'Thou shalt not kill.'Tóti: "Yes. Tóti said carefully." Agnes: "Then Blondal and the rest are going against God. They're hypocrites. They say they are carrying out God's law but they are only doing the will of men.

Hannah Kent

We must take the long view—every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition.

Nathanael West

The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy.

John Updike

There was an exceeding good concert, but too much talking to hear it well. Indeed I am quite astonished to find how little music is attended to in silence; for, though every body seems to admire, hardly any body listens.

Fanny Burney

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Hypocrisy Quotes

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