Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Vice

"Work banishes those three great evils: Boredom, vice and poverty." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"The real vice of a civilized republic is in the Turkish fable of the dragon with man heads and the dragon with many tails. The many heads hurt each other, and the many tails obey a single head which wants to devour everything." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant

"Envy is the most universal passion. We only pride ourselves on the qualities owe possess, or think we possess; but we envy the pretensions we have, and those which we have not, and do not even wish for. We envy the greatest qualities and every trifling advantage. We envy the most ridiculous appearance or affectation of superiority. We envy folly and conceit; nay, we go so far as to envy whatever confers distinction of notoriety, even vice and infamy." - William Hazlitt

"People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but itself." - William Hazlitt

"The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy." - William Hazlitt

"There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion. This makes nothing in their favor, but is a proud compliment to man’s nature. Whatever he is or does, he cannot entirely efface the stamp of the divinity on him. Let him strive ever so, he cannot divest himself of his natural sublimity of thought and affection, however he may pervert or deprave it to ill." - William Hazlitt

"There is one virtue in almost every vice except hypocrisy; and even that, while it is a mockery of virtue, is, at the same time, a compliment to it." - William Hazlitt

"There is no vice so simple, but assumes some mark of virtue on its outward parts." - William Shakespeare

"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." -

"The subtle is what is basic and the manifest is its result. The subtler has power to transform the gross but not vice versa. " - David Bohm, fully David Joseph Bohm

" Every breach of veracity indicates some latent vice, or some criminal intention, which the individual is ashamed to avow. " - Dugald Stewart

"Good taste is the worst vice ever invented. " - Edith Sitwell, fully Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell

"No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa." - Eugène Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu

"Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue." -

"Avarice is the vice of declining years." - George Bancroft

"The sight of a drunkard is a better sermon against that vice than the best that was ever preached on that subject." -

"In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgement of others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even honour, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness." -

"Gluttony is the vice of feeble minds." -

"Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue with bigots." - Jean-Antoine Petit-Senn

"Gluttony is the vice of feeble minds. " - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even honor, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. " - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law." - John Calvin

"Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue with bigots." - John Antoine Petit-Senn

"Slander is perhaps the only vice which no circumstance can palliate, as well as being one which we are most ingenious in concealing from ourselves." - John Baptiste Massillon

"Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails and impious men bear away, The post of honor is a private station." - Joseph Addison

"The non-spatial nature of consciousness makes it possible for any apparently unconscious entity to be conscious, and vice versa." - Kedar Joshi

"The rewards of vice and virtue are like the shadow following the substance. " - Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze

"Happiness lies neither in vice nor in virtue; but in the manner we appreciate the one and the other, and the choice we make pursuant to our individual organization." -

"People must learn that the accumulation of wealth by the successful conduct of business is the corollary of the improvement of their own standard of living and vice versa. They must realize that bigness in business is not an evil, but both the cause and effect of the fact that they themselves enjoy all those amenities whose enjoyment is called the “American way of life. " - Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises

"The happiness and unhappiness of the rational, social animal depends not on what he feels but on what he does; just as his virtue and vice consist not in feeling but in doing." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

"Happiness lies neither in vice nor in virtue; but in the manner we appreciate the one and the other, and the choice we make pursuant to our individual organization." - Marquis de Sade, born Donatien Alphonse François de Sade

"My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine." - Mary Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

"I would not be surprised to learn that some branch of our government conspired either actively to promote or passively to allow the attack on 9/11. For those who watched the reactionary political uses made of this tragedy, it’s easy to conjure up a variety of possible conspiratorial motives that would have led the president, the vice president, or some branch of the armed forces or CIA or FBI or other “security” forces to have passively or actively participated in a plot to re-credit militarism and war." - Michael Lerner

"Ambition is not a vice of little people." -

"Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet; the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies." -

"Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet; the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity, futility. I like the the word however. To me it suggests something altogether different: it evokes "concern"; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; an acute sense of the real which, however, never becomes fixed; a readiness to find our surroundings strange and singular; a certain relentlessness in ridding ourselves of our familiarities and looking at things otherwise; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is passing away; a lack of respect for traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential." - Michel Foucault

"Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa." - Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin

"Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations. Thus the individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom — and the more he is the product of society, the more does he receive from society and the greater his debt to it." - Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin

"Abuse nobody, and if a man abuse thee, and lay upon a vice which he knoweth in thee then do not disclose one which thou knowest in him." - Muhammad, also spelled Mohammad, Mohammed or Mahomet, full name Muhammad Ibn `Abd Allāh Ibn `Abd al-Muttalib NULL

"There is no vice in nature more debasing and destructive to men than intemperance. It robs them of their reason, reputation, and interest. It renders them unfit for human society. It degrades them below the beasts that perish, and justly exposes them to universal odium and contempt." - Nathaniel Emmons

"But nobody’s approval can make anything real. Even if the whole world denies your enlightenment you will still be enlightened, there will be no difference. Or vice versa: even if the whole world approves your enlightenment and you are not enlightened, all that approval is not going to make you enlightened." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

"Our central thesis is that technologies for mobilizing resources impose tight constraints on the forms of action that are possible. Once a person or group is using one technology, it is not easy to switch to another. Groups that are structured to raise money are not well structured to mobilize volunteers, and vice versa. Raising money through direct mail tends to concentrate power in a central national office, while raising money through canvassing creates large cadre of canvassers in local areas who need to be managed and motivated. Volunteers mobilized for a protest demonstration are not usually available for volunteer fund-raising" - Pamela Oliver and Gerald Maxwell

"The question that continues to reverberate to this day is whether human rights trump the rights of business, or vice versa, a conflict that has been ongoing for more than three hundred years... From an economic viewpoint, what citizens have been trying to do for two hundred years is to force business to pay full freight, to internalize their costs to society instead of externalizing them onto a river, a town, a single patient, or a whole generation." - Paul Hawken

"Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Her virtue was that she said what she thought; her vice that what she thought didn't amount to much. " - Peter Ustinov, fully Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov

"Virtue, thou in rags, may challenge more than vice set off with all the trim of greatness." - Philip Massinger

"The sure characteristic of a sound and strong mind is, to find, in everything, those certain bounds, quos ultra citrave nequit consistere rectum. These boundaries are marked out by a very fine line, which only good sense and attention can discover; it is much too fine for vulgar eyes. In manners, this line is good breeding; beyond it, is troublesome ceremony; short of it, is unbecoming negligence and inattention. In morals, it divides ostentatious Puritanism from criminal relaxation; in religion, superstition from impiety; and, in short, every virtue from its kindred vice or weakness." - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield