Judith Martin Quotes

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

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

We're all slight hypocrites who fall short of our ideals.

America's conscience is bankrupt. She lost all conscience a long time ago. Uncle Sam has no conscience.

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.

What they need is a little immorality in their lives. Then they wouldn't be so busy looking for it in other people's.

Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life, equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises, truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

Nowadays those are rewarded who make right appear wrong.

If we are surrounded by the trivial and the vicious, it is all too easy to make our peace with it.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

Whatever Romney's failings, he certainly doesn't suggest that the United States is teetering on the brink of a moral cesspool.

I feel sorry for many politicians... we expect them to be completely consistent and moralised when we're not.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

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

Reagan and Bush... made the world safe for hypocrisy.

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.

Inconsistency on the part of pastors and the faithful between what they say and what they do, between word and manner of life, is undermining the Church's credibility.

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

Let a man rise to power, and he has as many virtues as will furnish an epitaph. Let him fall from power, and he has more vices than the Prodigal Son.

A good man fallen among politicians.

Samuel J. Tilden says we are a nation of thieves and rascals. If that is so he ought to be President.

We have a Sunday code and a weekday code. We preach good and practice evil. We clothe the wolf of our actions in the sheep's clothing of our beautiful phrases.

Hypocrisy is a fearful evil, and every thing which has a tendency to produce it should be avoided.

In these days when apparently vice triumphs and virtue must be penalized, it may be well for all of us to fight the undertow by which our children may be dragged under and must of necessity perish.