Seneca the Younger Quotes

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

… he must deceive, misrepresent, leave false impressions … and trust to charm, loyalty and the result to make up for it…. A great man cannot be a good man.

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

Fearful is the seductive power of goodness.

Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.

Where there is no religion, hypocrisy becomes good taste.

Virtue must be valuable, if men and women of all degrees pretend to have it.

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

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.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

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

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong.

In the world in which we live, truth is an ancillary virtue, but it shouldn't be.

There's good and bad everywhere in any aspect in life. The only people who we can't really trust are politicians. Because those guys lie to everybody and constantly.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.

Moral crusade: Public activity undertaken by middle-aged men who are cheating on their wives or diddling little boys. Moral crusades are particularly popular among those seeking power for their own personal pleasure, politicians who can't think of anything useful to do with their mandates, and religious professionals suffering from a personal inability to communicate with their god.

If we insist that public life be reserved for those whose personal history is pristine, we are not going to get paragons of virtue running our affairs. We will get the very rich, who will contract out the messy things in life: the very dull, who have nothing to hide and nothing to show: and the very devious, expert at covering their tracks and ambitious enough to risk their discovery.

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.