quotations about vice
Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
attributed, Napoleon in His Own Words
A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues.
G. K. CHESTERTON
What I Saw in America
The only vice some men have is their claim to being virtuous.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
So in the wicked there's no vice
Of which the saints have not a spice.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Hudibras
Vice turns beauty into deformity.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Sir Charles Grandison
The heart resolves this matter in a trice:
Men only feel the smart, but not the vice.
ALEXANDER POPE
Imitations of Horace
In vices, the very essence of crime -- that is, the design to injure the person or property of another -- is wanting. It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without a criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practices a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others. Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property; no such things as the right of one man to the control of his own person and property, and the corresponding and coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property. For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.
LYSANDER SPOONER
"Vices are not crimes", Niagara Falls Reporter, May 6, 2014
What maintains one vice would bring up two children.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin
How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Power and the Glory
The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Vanity Fair
We may say, vices wait on us in the course of our life as the landlords with whom we successively lodge, and if we traveled the road twice over, I doubt if our experience would make us avoid them.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
attributed, Encyclopædia of Quotations: A Treasury of Wisdom, Wit and Humor, Odd Comparisons and Proverbs
Virtue makes us appear amiable to others; vice, contemptible even to ourselves.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
In some way the secret vice exhales its poison; and the evil passion, however cunningly masked, stains through to the surface.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.
MARK TWAIN
Stories
The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.
REBECCA WEST
The Thinking Reed
The bow well bent and smart and spring,
Vice seems already slain;
But passion rudely snaps the string,
And it revives again.
WILLIAM COWPER
"Human Frailty"
If we look about us, most of the once well-known vices are now at least "rights", if not crimes to oppose them, even to define them accurately. Indeed, it is called "making the world a better place", if we do not look too carefully at what actually goes on.
JAMES V. SCHALL
"On the First Day of Spring", The Catholic World Report, March 20, 2017
The man who has no vices probably has some of the worst virtues.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
He hasn't a single redeeming vice.
OSCAR WILDE
Epigrams: An Anthology
Men often abstain from the grosser vices as too coarse and common for their appetites, while the vices which are frosted and ornamented are served up to them as delicacies.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts