He is a hypocrite who professes what he does not believe; not he who does not practice all he wishes or approves.

- William Hazlitt

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

- Andre Gide

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

- Oscar Wilde

The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.

- Jane Addams

When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy.

- John Kerry

One should examine oneself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

- Moliere

All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.

- Logan Pearsall Smith

Corruption and hypocrisy ought not to be inevitable products of democracy, as they undoubtedly are today.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

- Thomas Paine

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The world is full of fools and faint hearts; and yet everyone has courage enough to bear the misfortunes, and wisdom enough to manage the affairs, of his neighbor.

- Benjamin Franklin

Compromise is but the sacrifice of one right or good in the hope of retaining another -- too often ending in the loss of both.

- Tryon Edwards

Hypocrisy and distortion are passing currents under the name of religion.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.

- Edmund Burke

I'm a committed Christian. I worship in my own way. That's my business. That's not the business of the pharisees who are going to preach to me about what I do and then do something else.

- Howard Dean

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.

- W. Somerset Maugham



Clean your finger before you point at my spots.

- Benjamin Franklin



Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.

- Francois de La Rochefoucauld



The only vice which cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.

- William Hazlitt



Hypocrisy, the lie, is the true sister of evil, intolerance, and cruelty.

- Raisa Gorbachev



What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

- Hannah Arendt



Go put your creed into the deed,

Nor speak with double tongue.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson