Vice Quotes

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

Bertrand Russell

In Paris, everything's for sale: wise virgins, foolish virgins, truth and lies, tears and smiles.

Émile Zola

If you don't want anyone to know it don't do it.

Chinese Proverb

I'll habits gather by unseen degrees As brooks make rivers rivers run to seas.

John Dryden

Vice can be learnt even without a teacher.

Seneca

There's a small choice in rotten apples.

William Shakespeare

Everyone has his faults which he continually repeats neither fear nor shame can cure them.

Jean de La Fontaine

They also serve who only stand and wait.

John Milton

Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As for an authentic villain the real thing the absolute the artist one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.

Colette

It is a great misfortune to be of use to nobody scarcely less to be of use to everybody.

Baltasar Gracián

It's true Heaven forbids some pleasures but a compromise can usually be found.

Molière

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider's web.

Edwin Way Teale

What maintains one vice would bring up two children.

Benjamin Franklin

Vice goes a long way tow'rd makin' life bearable. A little vice now an' thin is relished by th' best iv men.

Finley Peter Dunne

When I religiously confess myself to myself I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.

Michel de Montaigne

One big vice in a man is apt to keep out a great many smaller ones.

Bret Harte

Vice is as much a part of human nature as folly and pornography may be as necessary to vent vice as satire is to vent folly.

Mavor Moore

He who hates vice hates men.

John Morley

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 a whole city.

Thornton Wilder

The vices we scoff at in others laugh at us within ourselves.

Thomas Browne

It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable grounds.

Samuel Butler

When our vices leave us we flatter ourselves with the credit of having left them.

La Rochefoucauld

Many without punishment none without sin.

John Ray

If individuals have no virtues their vices may be of use to us.

Junius

Twas doing nothing was his curse. Is there a vice can plague us worse?

Hannah More

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

Ouida

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

I Guess there is a Limited Gap in this Republic of Bananas due to the DeKay N Y is Le Vice such an alarming Exchange when you Express your Benetton? Ask Tommy, he’ll figure!

Natasha Tsakos

It is not a vice or a show of weakness when you live by the principle of delay gratification.

Sunday Adelaja

I had a dream about you last night. Our vices had wings and our fears could breathe fire. There was nowhere to hide and we were trapped alive. So you reached for your sword and slashed my arm, waking me and saving my life.

Crystal Woods

What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring

Søren Kierkegaard

Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased and I turned away with disgust and loathing.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Why should there be some sort of virtue always attributed to a frank admission of vice?

Gordon R. Dickson

The problem with a lot of people is that what they think is a virtue is actually a vice in disguise. It's much easier to convince yourself that you're reasonable and civilised, than soft and weak, isn't it?

Kevin Dutton

Vice is nice, but a little virtue won't hurt you.

Edward Gorey

What are your chief vices? And virtues? I have no vices. The concept doesn't exist in my vocabulary. My chief virtue is gratitude

Truman Capote

What we're fighting against isn't an out-and-out vice. It's an overgrown, perverted virtue.

Jared Taylor

If we can spend more time uprooting vices and rooting virtues, our world will be safer and better.

Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

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

Alexander Pope

New York, I thought, was a city defined by its flaws. In every possible way, its virtues were overwhelmed by its vices, as Jekyll was by Hyde. Yet it was these very vices that gave the city its character - like tar in an oak barrel lending its flavor to Scotch.

Miles Watson

A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues.

G.K. Chesterton

Every vice leads to cruelty. Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty. Most atrocities are stimulated by accounts of the enemy's atrocities; and pity for the oppressed classes, when separated from the moral law as a whole, leads by a very natural process to the unremitting brutalities of a reign of terror.

C.S. Lewis

And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by others.

Plutarch

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

Franz Kafka

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered...it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

G.K. Chesterton

To be proud of virtue, is to poison yourself with the Antidote.

Benjamin Franklin

Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion.

Charles Robert Maturin

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.

N.T. Wright

Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.

François de La Rochefoucauld

All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.

Fernando Pessoa

The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

People hate to see their vices depicted, but vice is terrible and it should be depicted.

Aubrey Beardsley

Your only vice is yourself. The worst of all. The really incurable one.

Alfred Hayes

He spoke in hard and angry earnest, if a man ever did," replied the girl, shaking her head. "He is an earnest man when his hatred is up. I know many who do worse things; but I'd rather listen to them all a dozen times, than to that Monks once.

Charles Dickens

The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific. Therefore the base classes, primarily the women, practice an enforced continence with respect to these stimulants, except in countries where they are obtainable at a very low cost. From archaic times down through all the length of the patriarchal regime it has been the office of the women to prepare and administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite of the men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness and the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark, at the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to afford the indulgence. Infirmities induced by over-indulgence are among some peoples freely recognised as manly attributes. It has even happened that the name for certain diseased conditions of the body arising from such an origin has passed into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble" or "gentle". It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the symptoms of expensive vice are conventionally accepted as marks of a superior status, and so tend to become virtues and command the deference of the community; but the reputability that attaches to certain expensive vices long retains so much of its force as to appreciably lesson the disapprobation visited upon the men of the wealthy or noble class for any excessive indulgence. The same invidious distinction adds force to the current disapproval of any indulgence of this kind on the part of women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional distinction has not lost its force even among the more advanced peoples of today. Where the example set by the leisure class retains its imperative force in the regulation of the conventionalities, it is observable that the women still in great measure practise the same traditional continence with regard to stimulants.

Thorstein Veblen

The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialisation as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities.

Thorstein Veblen

Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.

Napoléon Bonaparte

It is irrelevant to the entrepreneur, as the servant of the consumers, whether the wishes and wants of the consumers are wise or unwise, moral or immoral. He produces what the consumers want. In this sense he is amoral. He manufactures whiskey and guns just as he produces food and clothing. It is not his task to teach reason to the sovereign consumers. Should one entrepreneur, for ethical reasons of his own, refuse to manufacture whiskey, other entrepreneurs would do so as long as whiskey is wanted and bought. It is not because we have distilleries that people drink whiskey; it is because people like to drink whiskey that we have distilleries. One may deplore this. But it is not up to the entrepreneurs to improve mankind morally. And they are not to be blamed if those whose duty this is have failed to do so.

Ludwig von Mises

Nonetheless, many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society’s economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the Industrial Revolution. Now under capitalism the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books and silly moving pictures. The “ideological superstructure” of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show and the art of striptease, the Hollywood pictures and the detective stories.

Ludwig von Mises

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