Moral Facade Quotes

The world is ashamed of being virtuous.

Men who ape the saint and play the sinner.

It is terrifying to see how easily, in certain people, all dignity collapses. Yet when you think about it, this is quite normal since they only maintain this dignity by constantly striving against their own nature.

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

It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed every one is at a play.

Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.

It is not true that drink changes a man's character. It may reveal it more clearly.

'Tis very strange Men should be so fond of being thought wickeder than they are.

Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers. It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.

We are plated with piety, not alloyed with it.

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

Any action coming out of unconsciousness is sin. The action may look virtuous, but it cannot be. You may create a beautiful facade, a character, a certain virtuousness; you may speak the truth, you may avoid lies; you may try to be moral, and so on and so forth. But if all this is coming from unconsciousness, it is all sin.

Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.

This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!

Perhaps it's just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior.

Often a man goes on for years imaging that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.

My brothers and sister and I were brought up in an atmosphere which I would describe as 'Puritan decadence'. Puritanism names the behaviour which is condemned; Puritan decadence regards the name itself as indecent, and pretends that the object behind that name does not exist until it is named.

We are much mistaken if we think that men are always brave from a principle of valor, or women chaste from a principle of modesty.

Let them cant about decorum, Who have characters to lose!

I wonder if this is how is is with all evil men, that to someone, they look just like good men, talk like good men, are just as likable as good men.

[On Christianity:] Its lip-service and its empty rites have made it the easiest of all tasks for the usurer to cloak his cruelties, the miser to hide his avarice, the lawyer to condone his lies, the sinner of all social sins to purchase the social immunity from them by outward deference to churches.

Even the most dishonest officer would want to be seen as a role model for his children.

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.

The good thing about being a hypocrite is that you get to keep your values.

However wicked men may be, they do not dare openly to appear the enemies of virtue, and when they desire to persecute her they either pretend to believe her false or attribute crimes to her.