This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Old age brings this one vice to mankind, that we all think too much of money." - Terence, full Latin name Publius Terentius Afer NULL
"This is the great vice of academicism that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking." - Lionel Trilling
"Politics drives diplomacy, not vice versa." - James Baker, fully James Addison Baker, III
"The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas." - Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery." - Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
"Sensuality is the vice of young men and of old nations." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"The worst type of sin, in fact the only “mortal sin” which has enslaved man for the greater part of history, is the institutionalized sin. Under the institution, vice appears to be, or is actually turned into, virtue. Apathy toward evil is thus engendered; recognition of sin becomes totally effaced; sinful institutions become absolutized, almost idolized, and sin becomes absolutely moral." - Laurenti Magesa
"Just as virtue is its own reward, so is vice its own punishment." - Baltasar Gracián
"Assuredly, he, who is only kept from vice by the fear of punishment, is no wise acted on by love, and by no means embraces virtue. For my own part, I avoid or endeavor to avoid vice, because it is at direct variance with my proper nature and would lead me astray from the knowledge and love of God." -
"If a man be covetous, what further vice can he have?" - Bhartrihari NULL
"Good Presidents make good staffs, not vice versa." - Bill Moyers
"In an age remarkable for good reasoning and bad conduct, for sound rules and corrupt manners, when virtue fills our heads, but vice our hearts; when those who would fain persuade us that they are quite sure of heaven, appear in no greater hurry to go there than other folks, but put on the livery of the best master only to serve the worst; in an age when modesty herself is more ashamed of detection than delinquency; when independence of principle consists in having no principle on which to depend; and free thinking, not in thinking freely, but in being free from thinking; in an age when patriots will hold anything except their tongues; keep anything except their word; and lose nothing patiently except their character; to improve such an age must be difficult; to instruct it dangerous; and he stands no chance of amending it who cannot at the same time amuse it." - Charles Caleb Colton
"He that has energy enough in his constitution to root out a vice should go a little further, and try to plant a virtue in its place; otherwise he will have his labor to renew. A strong soil that has produced weeds may be made to produce wheat with far less difficulty than it would cost to make it produce nothing." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Hypocrisy is a homage which vice pays to virtue." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"We never condemn vice or praise virtue without a selfish motive." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the small and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulation of life. A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure." - Edmund Burke
"Fortune is an evil chain to the body, and vice to the soul." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"It will be found a work of no small difficulty to dispossess a vice from the heart, where long possession begins to plead prescription." - Francis Bacon
"The march of world history stands outside virtue, vice and justice." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"The martyrs to vice far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and number. So blinded are we to our passions, that we suffer more to insure perdition than salvation." - Hannah More
"The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without in himself." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one is without in himself." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Change a virtue in its circumstances and it becomes a vice; change a vice in its circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of a man is found concealed far below these moral badges." - Hippolyte Adolphe Taine
"Virtue in distress and vice in triumph, make atheists of mankind." - John Dryden
"Virtue that wavers is not virtue, but vice revolted from itself, and after a while returning. the actions of just and pious men do not darken in their middle course." - John Milton
"[On children] Train them to virtue; habituate them to industry, activity, and spirit. Make them consider every vice as shameful and unmanly. Fire them with ambition to be useful. Make them disdain to be destitute of any useful knowledge. Fix their ambition upon great and solid objects, and their contempt upon little, frivolous, and useless ones." - John Quincy Adams
"Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible. Vice is infamous, though in a prince; and virtue honorable, though in a peasant." - Joseph Addison
"We see the pernicious effects of luxury in the ancient Romans, who immediately found themselves poor as soon as this vice got footing among them." - Joseph Addison
"When a man has been guilty of any vice or folly, I think the best atonement he can make for it is to warn others not to fall into the like." - Joseph Addison
"The overcoming of private property means the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it means this emancipation precisely because these senses and qualities have become human both subjectively and objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object derived from and for the human being. The senses have therefore become theoreticians immediately in their practice. They try to relate themselves to their subject matter for its own sake, but the subject matter itself is an objective human relation to itself and to the human being, and vice versa. Need or satisfaction have thus lost their egoistic nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use." - Karl Marx
"The soul may be compared to a field of battle, where the armies are ready every moment to encounter. Not a single vice but has a more powerful opponent, and not one virtue but may be overborne by a combination of vices." - Oliver Goldsmith
"There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue." - Oliver Goldsmith
"Virtue is one, but... the forms of vice are innumerable." - Plato NULL
"Virtue is voluntary, vice involuntary." - Plato NULL
"Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Our faith comes in moments: our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Our faith comes in moments, our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"You fear to quit the medleys of the world, where vanity reigns, where avarice tarnishes the most beautiful virtues, where infidelity holds dominion with the sway of a despot, where virtue is trampled under foot and vice carries off the prize of honor." - Saint Francis de Sales NULL
"It is not possible to form any other notion of the origin of vice than as the absence of virtue." - Saint Gregory, aka Pope Gregory I, St. Gregory the Dialogist, "Gregory the Great" NULL
"It was asked of the sage, In what one virtue are all the rest comprised? Patience, was his answer. And in what single vice are all the others concentrated? Vindictiveness." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
"Vice is but a nurse of agonies." - Philip Sidney, fully Sir Philip Sidney
"The vice of envy is… always a confession of inferiority." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"As virtue is its own reward, so vice is its own punishment." - Thomas Fuller
"Hypocrisy is a Sort of Homage, that Vice pays to Virtue." - Thomas Fuller