Charles Dickens Quotes

As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

Wrong people are wrong not because of their faults but because of their presumed virtues.

I do think sometimes people get morally superior without understanding situations.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

We have only God on our side; they have 'In God We Trust' on their side.

Anyone who claims to have an entirely clear conscience is almost certainly a bore.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

A key to the mentality of the left is that it judges itself by its best intentions, and judges its opponents - America chief among them - by their worst deeds.

Moral indignation in most cases is, 2% moral, 48% indignation, and 50% envy.

Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.

The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.

The man who spends all his time looking up to heaven is not always the best; in fact, he is usually the worst.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

How dare you put yourself in that position where you are the moral judge?

We are living in a sanctimonious age.

The best men are not consistent in good--why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

The thing I hate the most in any kind of writing is self-righteousness. Where you pretend you don't have the same kinds of flaws your subject has.

The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.

A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.

He is a hypocrite who professes what he does not believe; not he who does not practice all he wishes or approves.

I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.

There are few things more disturbing than to find, in somebody we detest, a moral quality which seems to us demonstrably superior to anything we ourselves possess. It augurs not merely an unfairness on the part of creation, but a lack of artistic judgment. Sainthood is acceptable only in saints.

Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a large portion of it is rather the condition of all being-good.

The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.