“The pistol and dagger may as easily be made the auxiliaries of vice, as of virtue.”

Book IV, "Of Tyrannicide"
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The pistol and dagger may as easily be made the auxiliaries of vice, as of virtue." by William Godwin?
William Godwin photo
William Godwin 36
English journalist, political philosopher and novelist 1756–1836

Related quotes

“Beware of knowing your virtues; you may lose them. Beware of knowing your vices; you may forgive them.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#166
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

James A. Garfield photo

“Promises may not be kept, plighted faith may be broken, and vaunted virtue be only the cunning mask of vice. We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke: but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

Speech at Arlington Cemetery, Decoration Day (30 May 1868)
1860s
Context: I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion. If silence is ever golden, it must be here, beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung. With words we make promises, plight faith, praise virtue. Promises may not be kept, plighted faith may be broken, and vaunted virtue be only the cunning mask of vice. We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke: but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.

Albert Barnes photo
Samuel Butler photo

“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.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Vice and Virtue, ii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality

Louis Bourdaloue photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Circles
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Ben Jonson photo

“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.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

Epode, lines 1-4
The Works of Ben Jonson, First Folio (1616), The Forest

William Shakespeare photo
Theodor Mommsen photo

“Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, pt. 2, translated by W.P.Dickson.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Related topics