William Hazlitt Quotes

How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

A man given to vice is always an idealist.

Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.

Vice deceives us when dressed in the garb of virtue.

History teaches us virtue, but nature never ceases to teachh us vice.

A saint abroad, and a devil at home.

I live by the code 'Kill them with kindness, blood everywhere;' for me, it's always about being the nicest kind of guy.

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain't so.

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.

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

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.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

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

The better day, the worse deed.

Irony, I feel, is a very high form of morality.

The truthful man is usually a liar.

The upholders of Capitalism are dreamers and visionaries who, instead of doing good with evil intentions do evil with the best intentions.

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.

There are a great many men valued in society who have nothing to recommend them but serviceable vices.

You can be brilliant in some ways and despicable in others. You can be a clean, upright, moral individual in your private life who never swears, treats women with respect, and speaks highly of duty and honor - and go out every day and dedicate yourself to a cause that makes the world worse.

Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.