Vicesimus Knox Quotes

The vices of others we have before our eyes, our own are behind our backs.

I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.

L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu.

You must master the vices. You know that if a thing is worth doing it's worth doing well. If, however, a thing is not worth doing then it's worth doing fabulously, amazingly, with grace, style and panache.”

We must carefully teach children to detest vices for what they consist in; we must teach them their natural ugliness, so that they flee them not only in their deeds but in their minds: the very thought of them should be hateful, whatever mask they hide behind.

Aliena vitia in oculis habemus, a tergo nostra sunt.

Study to sever pleasure from vice.

All sensible people agree in thinking that large seminaries of young ladies, though managed with all the vigilance and caution which human abilities can exert, are in danger of great corruption.

I can not believe that this is any bona fide effort to suppress immorality. There are too many signs about it which compel to the sorrowful conclusion that there has grown up among us a Society, whose original aim may have been to suppress vice, but which has now fallen under control of persons with other aims. It would appear that to these the circulation of many thousands of a book they call vicious is of little importance compared with making a sensation, and parading their own spotlessness before the public; and beyond this, it is to be feared that a still baser influence has been at work to degrade this association of (originally, no doubt) well-meaning, though weak-minded people. There is money in it. A good deal of patronage and wealth has gone to it in the past, and its agents are highly paid; and if this stream of money and patronage is to continue to flow and gladden the host of agents, they must keep up a show of activity. They must always be attitudinising as purifiers of society. If the nests of crime and vice are trampled out, and the funds begin to fall low, they must try and make their subscribers think there are nests where there are none; and, knowing well how unpopular Freethinkers are, how few friends they have in high places, they found among them a book which repeated the details of ordinary physiological and medical books—a book whose pages, with all their faults, are nowhere of biblical impurity. It must have brought their secretaries, and their lawyers, and their secret-service agents, a golden Pactolus from orthodox purses to thus prove that the society might do injury to Freethinkers under cover of attacking immorality. The old privilege of the orthodox to imprison their opponents—the privilege so loved, but lost—must seem about to come back again, when it has been decided that facts familiar in the libraries of medicine and science cannot be printed by Freethinkers in a form accessible to the people without imprisonment. They know that many of these Freethinkers value their freedom highly enough to go to gaol for it, and they are, no doubt, hoping for more victims and a flourishing business with plenty of vice to suppress.

Can anything be more absurd than keeping women in a state of ignorance, and yet so vehemently to insist on their resisting temptation?

O philosophy, life’s guide! O searcher-out of virtue and expeller of vices! What could we and every age of men have been without thee?

To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.

Every other vice hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of some excuse, but envy wants both.

The vices of which we are full we carefully hide from others, and we flatter ourselves with the notion that they are small and trivial; we sometimes even embrace them as virtues.

There are no vices more dangerous than those which simulate virtue.