William J. Donovan Quotes

The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world.

There's no one so self-righteous as someone policing someone else's morality.

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

… moral 5 o’clock shadow

Beware of self-righteousness. The black devil of licentiousness destroys his hundreds, but the white devil of self-righteousness destroys his thousands.

Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a large portion of it is rather the condition of all being-good.

The man who acts the least, upbraids the most.

Joseph is the wearisomest and self-righteous Pharisee who ever ransacked the Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses on his neighbor.

There's one thing that always interests me about you good people, not your certainty that the rest of us are swine, - no doubt we are, - but your certainty that your opinions are pearls.

Someone who is determinedly trying to show God how good he or she is is likely to become an insufferable prig.

Whenever you are faced with someone who has made far more errors in judgment and far more mistakes than you, you have a tendency to get on your high horse.

There is so much hypocrisy in sports.

I have a zero tolerance for sanctimonious morons who try to scare people.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

Superstitious persons, who know better how to rail at vice than how to teach virtue, and who strive not to guide men by reason, but so to restrain them that they would rather escape evil than love virtue, have no other aim but to make others as wretched as themselves;

Little sins are great when great men commit them.

… extreme, polarizing, moralistic, and unattractive

We are living in a sanctimonious age.

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.

The thing I hate the most in any kind of writing is self-righteousness. Where you pretend you don't have the same kinds of flaws your subject has.

I've discovered I am quite a puritanical person.

At times, it appears easy to sermonise on morality and ethics. But morality and ethics appear good only when applied to others, never on oneself.

The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.

Am I self-righteous? Why not? It's not like I can count on you to be righteous for me.

God has nothing to say to the self-righteous.