Thomas Jefferson Quotes

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

It's when someone has an agenda of their own for the record that it doesn't work for me.

Everybody has an agenda.

Now, I know a lot of things in the big man's world are not what they seem: a lot of people are out for themselves, and you can't always trust what someone says.

Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues.

Satan often paints sin with virtue's colors.

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.

Villainy wears many masks; none so dangerous as the mask of virtue.

Virtue with some is nothing but successful temerity.

Who is only good that others may know it, and that he may be the better esteemed when 'tis known, who will do well but upon condition that his virtue may be known to men, is one from whom much service is not to be expected.

No vice exists which does not pretend to be more or less like some virtue, and which does not take advantage of this assumed resemblance.

Cunning is none of the best nor worst qualities; it floats between virtue and vice; there is scarce any exigence where it may not, and perhaps ought not to be supplied by prudence.

The Devil may also make use of morality.

Men frequently do good only to give themselves opportunity of doing ill with impunity.

What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.

The truth of course was otherwise, but Lecha had never felt she owed anyone the truth, unless it was truth about their own lives, and then they had to pay her to tell them.

What we take for virtue is often but an assemblage of various ambitions and activities that chance, or our own astuteness, have arranged in a certain manner; and it is not always out of courage or purity that men are brave, and women chaste.

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

Littlefinger looked like a boy who had just taken a furtive bite from a honeycomb. He was TRYING to watch for bees, but the honey was so sweet.

Virtue by calculation is the virtue of vice.

However evil men may be they dare not be openly hostile to virtue, and so when they want to attack it they pretend to find it spurious , or impute crimes to it.

He who goes round about in his requests wants commonly more than he chooses to appear to want.

Hell is both sides of the tomb, and a devil may be respectable and wear good clothes.

Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.