Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

Everyone is born sincere and die deceivers.

The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places.

Nowadays those are rewarded who make right appear wrong.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

Whenever there are great virtues, it's a sure sign something's wrong.

Hypocrisy is the outside of cynicism.

I completely scorn the falsifying, the sanctimonious, the cheap and the shoddy.

The pride of life hath corrupted the judgment of others, and perverted them in the way of religion.

The better day, the worse deed.

None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.

Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.

There is hardly a single person in the House of Commons worth painting; though many of them would be better for a little whitewashing.

We corrupt the word of truth, and mix ... our doctrine with what is common and cheap... in order to turn the adulteration to our profit, and accommodate ourselves to those who meet us, and curry favor with everyone, becoming ventriloquists and chatterers, who serve their own pleasures by words uttered from the earth, and sinking into the earth, and, to gain the special good will of the multitude

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

Vice, in its true light, is so deformed, that it shocks us at first sight; and would hardly ever seduce us, if it did not at first wear the mask of some virtue.

Politics has become beyond acceptable when it comes to humanity. People are just frozen in falsehood.

So much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.

The worst of all knaves are those who can mimic their former honesty.

As creeping ivy clings to wood or stone, And hides the ruin that it feeds upon, So sophistry, cleaves close to, and protects Sin's rotten trunk, concealing its defects.

I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as ‘The Boneless Wonder’. My parents judged that the spectacle would be too demoralizing and revolting for my youthful eye and I have waited fifty years, to see The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.

It is the nature of ambition to make men liars and cheats, to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their mouths, to cut all friendships and enmities to the measure of their own interest, and to make a good countenance without the help of good will.

When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to [profess] things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Maintaining silence about a dirty truth is another way of lying, a common practice in high places.