Quotes on Vices

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

And Joe Biden, thank you for being the best Vice President I could ever hope for.

When it was reported to General Washington that the army was frequently indulging in swearing, he immediately sent out the following order: The general is sorry to be informed that the foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing - a vice little known heretofore in the American army - is growing into fashion. Let the men and officers reflect "that we can not hope for the blessing of heaven on our army if we insult it by our impiety and folly."

As we think of power in the 21st century, we want to get away from the idea that power’s always zero sum — my gain is your loss and vice versa. Power can also be positive sum, where your gain can be my gain.

By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.

Allah the Exalted loves him who forgoes worldly life, the Angels love him who rejects the vices, and the Muslims love him who gives up greediness in respect of the Muslims.

Passions are vices or virtues to their highest powers.

Virtues are dangerous as vices insofar as they are allowed to rule over one as authorities and not as qualities one develops oneself.

Therefore, in order not to have to rob his subjects, to be able to defend himself, not to become poor and contemptible, and not to be forced to become rapacious, a prince must consider it of little importance if he incurs the name of miser, for this is one of the vices that permits him to rule.

The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.

We can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

Those words, temperate and moderate, are words either of political cowardice, or of cunning, or seduction. A thing, moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper, is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice.

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

As the purpose of comedy is to correct the vices of men, I see no reason why anyone should be exempt.

I prefer a pleasant vice to an annoying virtue.

So for a good old-gentlemanly vice, I think I must take up with avarice.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

Alas! Man's vices, horrible as they are supposed to be, contain the positive proof of his taste for the infinite.

Man has reason, discrimination and free-will such as it is. The brute has no such thing. It is not a free agent, and knows no distinction between virtue and vice, good and evil. Man, being a free agent, knows these distinctions, and when he follows his higher nature, shows himself far superior to the brute, but when he follows his baser nature can show himself lower than the brute.

The cheapness of wine seems to be a cause, not of drunkenness, but of sobriety. ...People are seldom guilty of excess in what is their daily fare... On the contrary, in the countries which, either from excessive heat or cold, produce no grapes, and where wine consequently is dear and a rarity, drunkenness is a common vice.

So virtue is a purposive disposition, lying in a mean that is relative to us and determined by a rational principle, and by that which a prudent man would use to determine it. It is a mean between two kinds of vice, one of excess and the other of deficiency.