Hypocrisy Quotes

I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.

~ William F. Buckley Jr.

The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink

~ George Orwell

Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.

~ Walter Kirn

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.

~ Oscar Wilde

There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.

~ Charles Dickens

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hypocrisy annoys me, people need to look into mirrors. Let me hold a mirror in front of your face.

~ C. Joybell C.

How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.

~ Margaret Atwood

Mordred and Agravaine thought Arthur hypocritical—as all decent men must be, if you assume that decency can’t exist.

~ T.h. White

Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scatcherd's can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Philip wasn't the sort of man to make a friend of a woman. He wanted devotion. I gave him that. I did, you know. But I couldn't stand being made a fool of. I couldn;t stand being put on probation, like an office-boy, to see if I was good enough to be condescended to. I quite thought he was honest when he said he didn't believe in marriage -- and then it turned out that it was a test, to see whether my devotion was abject enough. Well, it wasn't. I didn't like having matrimony offered as a bad-conduct prize.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:Plagiarize!Plagiarize!Let no one else's work evade your eyes!Remember why the good Lord made your eyes!So don't shade your eyes,But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -Only be sure always to call it please 'resea

~ Tom Lehrer

Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.

~ Noam Chomsky

Hypocrisy has its own elegant symmetry.

~ Julie Metz

I have that hypocrisy of a parent in that I'm like,'Come on, you've got to toughen up at the same time let me take care of that for you.

~ Craig Ferguson

In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.

~ Malcolm Gladwell

Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance differed but little from the indifferentism …

~ Samuel Butler

And I may not omit here a special work of God's providence. There was a proud and very profane young man [aboard the Mayflower], one of the seamen, of a lusty, able body, which made him the more haughty; he would always be contemning the poor people in their [sea]sickness, and cursing them daily with grievous execrations, and did not let to tell them, that he hoped to help cast half of them overboard before they came to their journey's end, and to make merry with what they had; and if he were by any gently reproved, he would curse and swear most bitterly.But it pleased God before they came half seas over, to smite this young man with a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner, and so was himself the first that was thrown overboard. Thus his curses light on his own head; and it was an astonishment to all his fellows, for they noted it to be the just hand of God upon him.

~ William Bradford

Between ourselves, there are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Hypocrisy/hi pakrise/ noun1. The moment you tell someone it is not important to be right, in order to look right to everyone else.

~ Shannon L. Alder

The self-righteous scream judgments against others to hide the noise of skeletons dancing in their own closets.

~ John Mark Green

The fierce words of Jesus addressed to the Pharisees of His day stretch across the bands of time. Today they are directed not only to fallen televangelists but to each of us. We miss Jesus' point entirely when we use His words as weapons against others. They are to be taken personally by each of us. This is the form and shape of Christian Pharisaism in our time. Hypocrisy is not hte prerogative of people in high places. The most impoverished among us is capable of it. Hypocrisy is the natural expression of what is meanest in us all.

~ Brennan Manning

It's convenient how everyone who supports waterboarding and torture, or enhanced interrogation techniques as they like to call it, have never experienced it themselves. Yet everyone who has, myself included, are firmly against it.

~ Jesse Ventura

Creating some god for one's inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if did not.

~ Margaret Atwood

You sanctimonious philistines, who scoff at me!What has your politics fed onsince you've been ruling the world?On butchery and murder!

~ Charles De Coster

The more faithful preachers are to the Word of God in their preaching, the more liable they are to the charge of hypocrisy. Why? Because the more faithful people are to the Word of God the higher the message is that they will preach. The higher the message, the further they will be from obeying themselves.

~ R.c. Sproul

What are Christians known for? Outsiders think our moralizing, our condemnations, and our attempts to draw boundaries around everything. Even if these standards are accurate and biblical, they seem to be all we have to offer. And our lives are a poor advertisement for the standards. We have set the gameboard to register lifestyle points; then we are surprised to be trapped by our mistakes. The truth is we have invited the hypocrite image.

~ David Kinnaman

They were so absorbed in their plotting that they did not hear Boule de Suif return. But the Comte's whispered 'shh!' made them all look up. There she was. A sudden silence fell, and at first a feeling of embarrassment prevented them from speaking to her. At last, however, the Comtesse, more of an adept than the rest in social duplicity, asked her: 'Did you enjoy the christening?

~ Guy De Maupassant

The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the President on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm.

~ Christopher Hitchens

My unlucky star had destined me to be born when there was much talk about morality and, at the same time, more murders than in any other period. There is, undoubtedly, some connection between these phenomena. I sometime ask myself whether the connection was a priori, since these babblers are cannibals from the start - or a connection a posteriori, since they inflate themselves with their moralizing to a height which becomes dangerous for others.However that may be, I was always happy to meet a person who owed his touch of common sense and good manners to his parents and who didn't need big principles. I do not claim more for myself, and I am a man who for an entire lifetime has been moralized at to the right and the left - by teachers and superiors, by policemen and journalists, by Jews and Gentiles, by inhabitants of the Alps, of islands, and the plains, by cut-throats and aristocrats - all of whom looked as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths.

~ Ernst Jünger

I think there is a substantial difference between hypocrisy and diplomacy: hypocrisy is not saying things, diplomacy is knowing how to say things.

~ Luigina Sgarro

... it's pointless to think in moral terms when everything is permissible. We have become the people we detest. We have lost the capacity to imagine what is forbidden We have been freed, in other words, from our own hypocrisy.

~ Eric Gamalinda

The famous atheist Christopher Hitchens once declared that ‘You’re expelled from your mother’s uterus as if shot from a cannon, towards a barn door studded with old nail files and rusty hooks.’ Presumably that was what he had in mind when conceiving his three children.

~ Quentin S. Crisp

A court is the most depressing place on earth. Wherever there is a throne, one may observe in rich detail every folly and wickedness of which man is capable, enameled with manners and gilded with hypocrisy.

~ Gore Vidal

In the days following the crash, an axiom as old as the Republic came into play once more. In good times Wall Street wanted Washington to leave it alone. In bad times it wanted Washington to act.

~ Haynes Johnson

It is, indeed, one of the basic moral blindspots of American conservatism that its intellectual and leadership energy have never been focused in a proactive way on America's racial-caste legacy. This represents a fundamental moral crisis of modern American conservatism.... American conservatives typically ignored the authoritarian and violent racial-caste practices and values arrayed against black Americans in southern states where the vast majority of blacks live. On the other hand, American conservatives have, throughout this century, often embraced freedom movements elsewhere in the world --in Europe, Latin America, East Asia-- but always firmly resisting a proactive embrace of the black American civil rights movement as a bona fide freedom movement fully worthy of their support. So it is in the shadow of this dismal record of mainstream American conservatism vis-a-vis black Americans' long and arduous quest for equality of status that new black conservatives have emerged.

~ Martin Kilson

There was a young lady called Peaches,who simply loved animals to pieces.She ate pigs and sheep,and for cows she would weep,when baked in a sauce of rich greases.

~ Mango Wodzak

Be careful that you don't become a hypocrite by spending all your time trying to get others right with God before you worship Him yourself.

~ Oswald Chambers

Anyone who sang the praises of undying love in this day and age belonged to the first rank of hypocrites in Daisuke's estimate.

~ Sōseki Natsume

He who is not liberal with what he has, does but deceive himself when he thinks he would be liberal if he had more

~ William Swan Plumer