Our Centers for Ethics:

Quotations: Virtue and vice

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After hunger, a human's most important need is to know what is virtuous.
— Jerome Kagan, Harvard psychology professor and author (b. 1929)

He who hates vice, hates mankind.
— Pliny the Younger, Roman author (61-113 A.D.)

Our virtues are most often but our vices disguised.
— François duc de la Rochefoucauld, French memoirist and philosopher (1613-1680)

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
— Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), American humorist, author and journalist (1835-1910), in Puddnhead Wilson

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, public philosopher and poet (1803-1880)

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
— François duc de la Rochefoucauld, French epigrammatist (1613-1680)

More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.
— Robert Smith Surtees, English novelist and editor (1803-1864)

To many people, virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Virtue is the act by which one aims and/or keeps it.
— Ayn Rand, Russian-American philosopher and author (1905-1982)

If you live long enough, you get accused of things you never did and praised for virtues you never had.
— I.F. Stone, 20th-century American journalist

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