Alexander Cockburn Quotes

When our vices desert us, we flatter ourselves that we are deserting our vices.

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

Anyone who claims to have an entirely clear conscience is almost certainly a bore.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you're moral, saying your moral is not the same as acting morally.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

The higher the moral tone, the more suspect the speaker.

Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.

When you're on the side of the angels, it's easier to stretch the truth.

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

The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices.

You can be brilliant in some ways and despicable in others. You can be a clean, upright, moral individual in your private life who never swears, treats women with respect, and speaks highly of duty and honor - and go out every day and dedicate yourself to a cause that makes the world worse.

Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues.

A man given to vice is always an idealist.

The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen.

Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

Virtue sometimes pretends. Vice is always sincere.

The vices of which we are full we carefully hide from others, and we flatter ourselves with the notion that they are small and trivial; we sometimes even embrace them as virtues.

There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it.

It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.

The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.

Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions.

Roland had taught him that self-deception was nothing but pride in disguise, an indulgence to be denied.