Social Vice Quotes

The widespread interest in gossip is inspired, not by a love of knowledge but by malice: no one gossips about other people's secret virtues, but only about their secret vices. Accordingly most gossip is untrue, but care is taken not to verify it. Our neighbour's sins, like the consolations of religion, are so agreeable that we do not stop to scrutinise the evidence closely.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

I'll bring the red wine, you bring the ludes.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

It is hardly fair to blame America for the state of San Francisco, for its population is cosmopolitan and its seaport attracts the floating vice of the Pacific; but be the cause what it may, there is much room for spiritual betterment.

When poverty is more disgraceful than even vice, is not morality cut to the quick?

Why not, when it can be done without exposure or expense, let me rescue some of America's miserable children from vice and guilt?

A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.

A cardinal American virtue, 'ambition,' promotes a cardinal American vice, 'deviant behavior.

The accumulation of numbers always augments in some measure moral corruptions, and the consequences to health of the various vices incident thereto, are well known.

Slavery establishes false estimates of virtue and vice.

Most vices may be committed very genteelly: a man may debauch his friend's wife genteelly: he may cheat at cards genteelly

There are fifty churches in a city and a thousand saloons. The churches are open one day and two or three evenings in each week. The saloons are open every week-day all day long and far into the night.

Lastly no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this "ignoble tobagie" as Michelet calls it, spreads all over the world.