Charles M. Blow Quotes

Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.

I do think sometimes people get morally superior without understanding situations.

To smile at the jest which plants a thorn in another's breast is to become a principal in the mischief.

The virtue of some people consists wholly in condemning the vices in others.

A noble heart cannot suspect in others the pettiness and malice that it has never felt.

The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.

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;

The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid - I mean, all the stuff that our ruling class is.

Pleasure is sweetest when 'tis paid for by another's pain.

Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue in the eyes of bigots.

I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another's misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.

Your Reverence, I do not hate any man in this world enough to inflict the results of my prayers upon him.

Men are almost always cruel in their neighbors' faults; and make others' overthrow the badge of their own ill-masked virtue.

There is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently--without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.

I can't expect others to share my virtues. It's good enough for me if they share my vices.

Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else.

The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

Cruelty, I truly believe, is the one and only sin.

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

My definition of evil is unfriendliness.

It is very easy for us to go, you know, "I am being cruel to be kind," when really we are just ... being cruel. Because it makes us feel big, or whatever.

There was nothing more dangerous than people convinced of their own good intentions.

Even to smile at the misfortunes of others is to do an injury.

Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.