Walter Lippmann Quotes

Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues.

Men who ape the saint and play the sinner.

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

Though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something.

General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocite, flatterer.

The Devil may also make use of morality.

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

In all unmerciful actions, the worst of men pay this compliment at least to humanity, as to endeavour to wear as much of the appearance of it, as the case will well let them.

I'm pretty calculating. I take stuff that I know appeals to people's bad sides and match it up with stuff that appeals to their good sides.

There can scarcely be a more difficult thing than to play a double game. It is dangerous, and it is at times, a nice point to draw the distinction between such a game and dishonor.

He is only honest who is not discovered.

Canting hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.

… 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.

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.

Morality is a burglar's tool whose merit lies in never being left behind at the scene of the crime.

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

Where there is hypocrisy, there is hope.

Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism.

Virtue sometimes pretends. Vice is always sincere.

Not to be, but to seem, virtuous - it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery.

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

There is no vice so simple but assumes some mark of virtue on his outward parts.

Hypocrites always wanna play innocent