“Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified.”

“Virtue, if not in action, is a vice,
And, when we move not forward, we go backward.”

“Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.”

“At court, far from regarding ambition as a sin, people regard it as a virtue, or if it passes for a vice, then it is regarded as the vice of great souls, and the vices of great souls are preferred to the virtues of the simple and the small.”

“The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable; absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullnesses of it and the pomposities of it.”

“Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for morality which human beings arbitrarily devise.”

“The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.”

“Not to know vice at all, and keep true state,
Is virtue, and not fate:
Next to that virtue is to know vice well,
And her black spite expel.”

“A community of vices is a closer and more direct bond between human beings than a community of virtues.”

“His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.”