Hypocrisy and Vice
Although hypocrisy has been called "the tribute that vice pays to virtue", and a bit of it certainly greases the wheels of social exchange, it may also corrode the well-being of those people who continually make or are forced to make use of it. As Boris Pasternak has Yurii say in Doctor Zhivago, "Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike... Our nervous system isn't just fiction, it's part of our physical body, and it can't be forever violated with impunity."
The over-attribution of hypocrisy, however, could lead to excessive tolerance of deceit and destructive behavior.
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Famous quotes containing the words and vice, hypocrisy and/or vice:
“Me, what’s that after all? An arbitrary limitation of being bounded by the people before and after and on either side. Where they leave off, I begin, and vice versa.”
—Russell Hoban (b. 1925)
“Self-deception is nature; hypocrisy is art.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“I begin to find out that nothing but virtue will do in this damned world. I am tolerably sick of vice which I have tried in its agreeable varieties, and mean on my return to cut all my dissolute acquaintance and leave off wine and “carnal company,” and betake myself to politics and Decorum.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)