“Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.”

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

“When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.”

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed that they have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes.”

“A key measure of emotional intelligence is knowing that every virtue taken to its extreme becomes a vice.”

“Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”

“Empathy is a virtue which, when it only goes from parent to child, and is not required of the child, becomes a vice.”

“Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.”

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

“By cultivating friendliness towards happiness and compassion towards misery, gladness towards virtue and indifference towards vice, the mind becomes pure.”