“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)
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William Godwin 36
English journalist, political philosopher and novelist 1756–1836Related quotes

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.

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 437.

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

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

as quoted in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 137

“The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.”
Circles
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

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

“Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified.”
Source: Romeo and Juliet

“Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.”
Vol. 4, pt. 2, translated by W.P.Dickson.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2