Orson Scott Card Quotes

Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.

Fewer possess virtue, than those who wish us to believe that they possess it.

There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners.

The world is ashamed of being virtuous.

If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, piousness is virtue paying tribute to itself.

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

...righteousness [is] always more believable when combined with dreariness.

All the devils respect virtue.

He cannot be vertuous that is not rigorous.

A man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice.

If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind, generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.

If a superior man abandon virtue, how can he fulfil the requirements of that name?

I choose goodness... I will go without a dollar before I take a dishonest one. I will be overlooked before I will boast. I will confess before I will accuse. I choose goodness.

Honesty is nothin' compared to decency.

One of the greatest artifices the devil uses to engage men in vice and debauchery, is to fasten names of contempt on certain virtues, and thus fill weak souls with a foolish fear of passing for scrupulous, should they desire to put them in practice.

Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem.

Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

A good example brings about so much good, but hypocrisy brings about so much evil.

Temptations make one very censorious. If you are virtuous you condemn the wicked and if you are wicked, you condemn the virtuous.

Seeking the good is not primarily about rules and commandments.

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

You can't have integrity for breakfast, but try and keep it because it is perhaps the single most important word that defines not just writers but all human beings.