Moral Double Standard Quotes

Making matters worse is people's natural inclination to be easy on themselves, judging themselves according to their good intentions-while holding others to a higher standard and judging them by their worst actions.

It isn’t easy, but I guess I can understand why the good citizens of the hill country might let themselves be represented in Washington by a man who drinks too much. It isn’t easy, but I guess I can even understand why the good citizens of the hill country might even let themselves be represented by a man in Washington who carouses with city women while his wife and children are back here working the land. But, as God is my witness, I will never understand why the good people of the hill country would let themselves be represented by a man who takes female sheep up into the hills alone at night!

What is crime among the multitude is only vice among the few.

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

It's the old American Double Standard, ya know: Say one thing, do somethin' different. And of course this country is founded on the double standard. That's our history. We were founded on a very basic double standard: This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free.

For some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles; but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels.

Hypocrisy: prejudice with a halo.

Most people have seen worse things in private than they pretend to be shocked at in public.

The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

Conservatives are often fond of La Rochefoucauld's famous aphorism that 'Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,' and so tend to downplay hypocrisy as a sin. But in the marketplace of ideas they champion, hypocrisy may yet turn out to be the deadliest - or costliest - of sins.

Our [western] culture embraces sex addiction. If I drink too much or rack up credit-card debt or lose the rent in Vegas, that's bad. But if I have many lovers, that's good.

Everyone knows what a hypocrite is. That's the guy who gripes about the sex, violence and nudity on his VCR.

Why should American atrocities be merely unsettling, but a trip to Hanoi unconscionable?

The world will tolerate many vices, but not their diminutives.

Each generation thinks it invented sex; each generation is totally mistaken. Anything along that line today was commonplace both in Pompeii and in Victorian England; the differences lie only in the degree of coverup - if any.

It was served of the Jesuits, that they constantly inculcated a thorough contempt of worldly things in their doctrines, but eagerly grasped at them in their lives. They were wise in their generation; for they cried down worldly things because they wanted to obtain them, and cried up spiritual things, because they wanted to dispose of them.

Look at Thomas Jefferson. The guy had illegitimate kids in the 1700s, and they caught him last year. If you cheat on your wife and cover it up for 200 years, you're pretty much thinking you're home free.

What's shocking is cruelty and torture, and that's become our entertainment. Kids can play violent video games, but God forbid they look at a naked woman. That's pornography, that's perverse. No!

It's interesting to me that killing damages the image of God when it's done by a person, but it doesn't damage it when it's done by the state.

They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends? Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?...all this discussion of consciousness and whether animals have it is just a smokescreen. At bottom we protect our own kind. Thumbs up to human babies, thumbs down to veal calves.

Great Hypocrites are the real atheists.

American hypocrisy consists of thinking that everything is serious; French hypocrisy is to think that nothing is serious.

... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.

Consider the wave of revulsion that floods the average person when he or she hears of the practice of human sacrifice by the Aztecs and other so-called primitive peoples. How savage and barbaric such practices seem. But when a Christian or Jew comes across human sacrifice in the Bible (see Jephthah's immolation of his daughter in Judges 11:30-40), is he or she repulsed?

Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the Establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another. Pbscene is not the picture of a naked woman who exposes her pubic hair but that of a fully clad general who exposes his medals rewarded in a war of aggression; obscene is not the ritual of the Hippies but the declaration of a high dignitary of the Church that war is necessary for peace.