Quotations on Hypocrisy

Clean your finger before you point at my spots.

~ Benjamin Franklin

Where there is no religion, hypocrisy becomes good taste.

~ George Bernard Shaw

The value of an idea has nothing to do with the success of the man who expresses it.

~ Oscar Wilde

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and really being good all the time. That would be hypocracy.

~ Oscar Wilde

There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has the right to blame us.

~ Oscar Wilde

Hypocrite: the man who murdered both his parents ... pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Remember this: If you work for a man, in Heaven's name, work for him. If he pays you wages which supply your bread and butter, work for him; speak well of him; stand by the institution which he represents. If put to a pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness. If you must vilify, condemn and eternally disparage - resign your position, and when you are on the outside, damn to your heart's content, but as long as you are a part of the institution do not condemn it.

~ Elbert Hubbard

Extremes meet and there is no better example than the haughtiness of humility.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man alone is sincere; at the entrance of a second person hypocrisy begins.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat.

~ Samuel Butler

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners - let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

~ Aldous Huxley

A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.

~ Adlai E. Stevenson

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.

~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Many kiss the hand they wish cut off.

~ George Herbert

No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.

~ Samuel Johnson

He knows much of what men paint themselves would blister in the light of what they are.

~ Edwin Arlington Robinson

We are not hypocrites in our sleep.

~ William Hazlitt

I despise the pleasure of pleasing people whom I despise.

~ Michel de Montaigne

A bad man is worse when he pretends to be a saint.

~ Sir Francis Bacon

The teeth are smiling, but is the heart?

~ Proverbs

- Congolese Proverb

Affectation is a greater enemy to the face than smallpox.

~ Proverbs

- English Proverb

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

It is with pious fraud as with a bad action; it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.

~ Thomas Paine

For neither man nor angel can discern hypocracy, the only evil that walks invisible.

~ John Milton

When you say that you agree to a thing in principle, you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out.

~ Otto von Bismarck

Few men speak humbly of humility, chasely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.

~ Blaise Pascal