Laurence Sterne Quotes

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

Hypocrisy is the outside of cynicism.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

I believe that a long step toward public morality will have been taken when sins are called by their right names.

... a moral skunk .... [who has] debauched America ...

When you censure the Age, Be cautious and sage, Lest the Courtiers offended should be: If you mention Vice or Bribe, 'Tis so pat to all the Tribe ;, Each cries----That was levell'd at me.

There are certain seasons in the course of human affairs, when Genius, Virtue, and Patriotism, seems to nod over the vices of the times.

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.

Vice is Washington's signature. A fish rots from the head, and Washington has led our country into vice, greed, selfishness, and the mockery and destruction of human life.

To enjoy a good reputation, give publicly, and steal privately.

. . . if gold rust, what then will iron do?/ For if a priest be foul in whom we trust/ No wonder that a common man should rust. . . .

Too much virtue has a corrupting effect.

Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.

The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.

A legal broom's a moral chimney-sweeper, And that's the reason he himself's so dirty

In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.

Adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools, you got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules. When you gonna wake up?

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

I bring you this stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Phillipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

A curious reversal in the locus of moral concern has taken place: people feel responsible for everything except for what they do.

The devil loves 'curing' a small fault by giving you a great one.

by making himself a priest made himself a demon.

Those wretches who never have experienced the sweets of wisdom and virtue, but spend all their time in revels and debauches, sink downward day after day, and make their whole life one continued series of errors.