Hypocrisy Quotes

‘Ostentation is the signal flag of hypocrisy.’ – Edwin Hubbel Chapin

‘Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.’ – Francois de La Rochefoucauld

‘There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy, hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny.’ – Frederick William Robertson

‘I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating… because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.’ – Fidel Castro

‘Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you’re moral, saying you’re moral is not the same as acting morally.’ – Alan Dershowitz

‘The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.’ – William Hazlitt

‘With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.’ – Arthur Schopenhauer

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

‘Hypocrisy is the mother of all evil and racial prejudice is still her favourite child.’ – Don King

‘Hypocrisy is a detriment to progress. There’s always a hidden agenda.’ – Larry Flynt

‘Hypocrisy demonstrates how unaccountable one is to conventional morality.’ – Michael Shellenberger

‘Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.’ – Stendhal

‘For me, comedy starts as a spew, a kind of explosion, and then you sculpt it from there, if at all. It comes out of a deeper, darker side. Maybe it comes from anger, because I’m outraged by cruel absurdities, the hypocrisy that exists everywhere, even within yourself, where it’s hardest to see.’ – Robin Williams

‘A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.’ – Benjamin Disraeli

‘Prayer is good: but when used as a substitute for obedience, it is naught but a blatant hypocrisy, a despicable Pharisaism.’ – Charles Studd

‘The hypocrisy of some is that we like to think of ourselves as sophisticated and evolved, but we’re still also driven by primal urges like greed and power.’ – Michael Leunig

‘Hypocrisy is the outside of cynicism.’ – Mason Cooley

‘Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.’ – Jonah Goldberg

‘Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.’ – Jose Marti

‘Hypocrisy is a value that I think has been embraced by the Republican Party. We get lectured by people all day long about moral values by people who have their own moral shortcomings.’ – Howard Dean

‘Politeness, n: The most acceptable hypocrisy.’ – Ambrose Bierce

‘When hypocrisy is a character trait, it also affects one’s thinking, because it consists in the negation of all the aspects of reality that one finds disagreeable, irrational or repugnant.’ – Octavio Paz

‘I’m not two-faced, I’m honest, and I tell it the way it is. And I’m not good at hypocrisy, pretending to be someone I’m not.’ – Lady Colin Campbell

‘Hypocrisy is great fodder for comedy.’ – Mo Rocca

‘Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.’ – Grover Norquist

‘I cannot adequately express the horror I feel for a man who can be so base as to veil his hypocrisy under the cloak of religion, and state the base falsehood he has done.’ – James K. Polk

‘We must take positions. Our weakness in the West is born of the fact of so-called ‘objectivity.’ Objectivity does not exist – it cannot exist!… The word is a hypocrisy which is sustained by the lie that the truth stays in the middle. No, sir: Sometimes truth stays on one side only.’ – Oriana Fallaci

‘What links Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Andrej Babis, Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Marine Le Pen is one simple character trait: hypocrisy. These politicians aren’t tribunes of the people, they are hucksters. They aren’t bitter enemies of the Western system; they are con artists who seek to profit from it.’ – Anne Applebaum

”Liberal Fascism’ is less an expose of left-wing hypocrisy than a chance to exact political revenge. Yet, the title of his book aside, what distinguishes Goldberg from the Sean Hannitys and Michael Savages is a witty intelligence that deals in ideas as well as insults – no mean feat in the nasty world of the culture wars.’ – David Oshinsky

‘The idea of democracy has been stripped of it moral imperatives and come to denote hollowness and hypocrisy.’ – Paul Wellstone

‘Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.’ – Alexander Theroux

‘As long as the people persist in voting for or against men on account of their religious views, just so long will hypocrisy hold place and power.’ – Robert Green Ingersoll

‘I abhor hypocrisy.’ – Don Lemon

‘To be without guile is to be free of deceit, cunning, hypocrisy, and dishonesty in thought or action.’ – Joseph B. Wirthlin

‘In England the only homage which they pay to Virtue – is hypocrisy.’ – Lord Byron

‘Hypocrisy needs to be called out in American politics, and the absurd has reached the point where it is just insufferable.’ – Ana Navarro

‘Living on hypocrisy is not a healthy diet for patriots.’ – Tom Tancredo

‘Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.’ – Honore de Balzac

‘An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.’ – Michael Korda

‘And I think it’s really easy for people to point out hypocrisy in people’s lives.’ – Elliot Page

‘Hypocrisy is the ultimate power move. It is a way of demonstrating that one plays by a different set of rules from the ones adhered to by common people.’ – Michael Shellenberger

‘I think I wear my hypocrisy on my sleeve. I would never say I’m not a complete hypocrite.’ – Bo Burnham

‘Is not the brand of ‘double-dealer’ stamped on the forehead of every democratic slaveholder? Are not fraud and hypocrisy the religion of the man who calls himself a democrat, and hold his fellow-man in bondage?’ – John Quincy Adams

‘Morality becomes hypocrisy if it means accepting mothers’ suffering or dying in connection with unwanted pregnancies and illegal abortions and unwanted children.’ – Gro Harlem Brundtland

‘I always tell people that religious institutions and political institutions should be separate. So while I’m telling people this, I myself continue with them combined. Hypocrisy!’ – Dalai Lama

‘Either you look back and deal with your hypocrisy, or you dismiss it.’ – Jose Padilha

‘When I saw corruption, I was forced to find truth on my own. I couldn’t swallow the hypocrisy.’ – Barry White

‘Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.’ – Judith Martin

‘People relate to the spirit of the band, which is to live your way and succeed on your own terms. There’s no hypocrisy in being successful and still railing against conformity.’ – Paul Stanley

‘There is so much hypocrisy in sports.’ – Dennis Rodman

‘I think Socrates was fascinated by Alcibiades. It’s almost the opposite of hypocrisy. I think it’s like when you can see the potential in someone.’ – Bettany Hughes

‘There is often hypocrisy in our obsession with language. Many people use the ‘right’ language but still see me as a cripple, if you see what I mean.’ – Liz Carr

‘Candor and accountability in a democracy is very important. Hypocrisy has no place.’ – Alan Dershowitz

‘There has been far too much hypocrisy in the field of civil rights. It is easy enough to give rousing speeches or call for legislation which has no possibility of passage.’ – Robert Kennedy

‘Violent drama has been a hallmark of every great civilization. It is not the cause of the disease – it is an immunizing factor. People go to the theater to experience emotions like fear and loathing. Violent drama shows us where we come from. It makes us face our hypocrisy.’ – Michael Moriarty

‘Discretion is the polite word for hypocrisy.’ – Christine Keeler

‘Certain Arabs love Dubai because it’s not at all like where they live. Certain others hate it for the same reason. When you hear an Osama bin Laden sympathizer rant about the decadence and hypocrisy of the Arab ruling class, you can be certain he’s picturing a nightclub in Dubai.’ – Tucker Carlson

‘When I first saw a picture of the crucifixion, I lost respect for my parents. I suddenly realised that this is what the adult world is like – full of cruelty and hypocrisy.’ – Vivienne Westwood

‘Growing up, I always saw the hypocrisy of the Catholic church. The history speaks for itself, and I grew incredibly frustrated and angry. I essentially just put that into my words.’ – Hozier

‘The young people I know judge leaders by their deeds and abhor hypocrisy. Inconsistency and point-scoring do not win respect. It’s not easy to be engaged in political debate when it is reduced to performers trying to outdo each other. Actions from leaders must mirror the values they claim to espouse.’ – Alexandra Adornetto

‘When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.’ – Steven Pinker

‘I hate hypocrisy.’ – Dave Portnoy

‘There’s no hypocrisy in Hell’s Kitchen.’ – Ethel Waters

‘As an immigrant, I truly believed when I was coming to this country that people had the tools necessary to life to live a life that is prosperous, that is just and free. So, every single day, I am shocked with the hypocrisy of this country. That we are the wealthiest nation in the world. But we cannot figure out how to house our homeless people.’ – Ilhan Omar

‘Criticism is hypocrisy; society is hypocrisy. I’m a tourist. I’m a consumer. I do the things that I photograph and can be criticized of.’ – Martin Parr

‘I read the Bible, I speak through issues, I see what I think is hypocrisy in the church and things that are wrong, and I speak to these things. But I could be wrong.’ – Tony Campolo

‘No habit or quality is more easily acquired than hypocrisy, nor any thing sooner learned than to deny the sentiments of our hearts and the principle we act from: but the seeds of every passion are innate to us, and nobody comes into the world without them.’ – Bernard de Mandeville

‘You begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in.’ – Arundhati Roy

‘Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political, or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States.’ – William Blum

‘Honest discussions – even and perhaps especially on topics about which we disagree – can help us resist hypocrisy and arrogance. They can also help us live up to the basic ideals, such as liberty and justice for all, on which our country was founded.’ – David Price

‘Rural towns aren’t always idyllic. It’s easy to feel trapped and be aware of social hypocrisy.’ – Bill Pullman

‘I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy. Democrats have strong moral values. Frankly, my moral values are offended by some of the things I hear on programs like ‘Rush Limbaugh,’ and we don’t have to put up with that.’ – Howard Dean

‘It’s to be a person who’s able to shoot little arrows into sacred cows and knock politicians off their pedestals, to look out for hypocrisy, advocate for all sorts of things from social justice to peace.’ – Jonathan Shapiro

‘I would think a sense of the absurd is more important for a political cartoonist, because that could define things like a sense of hypocrisy or a sense of the things one has to be skeptical about.’ – Jonathan Shapiro

‘Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.’ – Pete Townshend

‘If privacy ends where hypocrisy begins, Kitty Kelley’s steamy expose is a contribution to contemporary history.’ – Eleanor Clift

‘Amin is the shame of the whole world. The fact that he managed to rule so long and commit so many crimes was only possible thanks to the hypocrisy of the East and the West who were waging the Cold War for world domination.’ – Ryszard Kapuscinski

‘There’s a lot more hypocrisy than before. Racism has gone back underground.’ – Richard Pryor

‘Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.’ – Victoria Woodhull

‘Why does the rest of the world put up with the hypocrisy, the need to put a happy face on sorrow, the need to keep on keeping on?… I don’t know the answer, I know only that I can’t.’ – Elizabeth Wurtzel

‘When part of what you’re trying to get at is the truth hidden under a taboo, or when you want to nail a hypocrisy, laughter is a very useful tool. I want to show the painful side of existence, but there is no question I also want to make people laugh.’ – Todd Solondz

‘The point is that there is tremendous hypocrisy among the Christian right. And I think that Christian voters should start looking at global warming and extreme poverty as a religious issue that speaks to the culture of life.’ – Al Franken

‘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 F. Kerry

‘Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.’ – Rebecca West

‘Net neutrality is a concept that the tech industry rallies around, but it is hypocrisy.’ – Dave Winer

‘Kids have what I call a built-in hypocrisy antenna that comes up and blocks out what you’re saying when you’re being a hypocrite.’ – Ben Carson

‘People can’t stand it when you deal with issues of race and class, and also sometimes the church, and you give a perspective that flushes out hypocrisy.’ – Jose Padilha

‘I do not believe in hypocrisy.’ – Vijay Mallya

‘As an outsider in America, you do see the kind of hypocrisy that’s rampant there.’ – Ben Mendelsohn

‘Whereas religious prayers sing of peace and harmony, religion has divided human beings through an atrocious history of enmity and bloodshed. Yet, behind the veil of superficiality and hypocrisy, I always believed in the inherent beauty of God that lies at the essence of all true spiritual paths.’ – Radhanath Swami

‘We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy.’ – Anthony Lewis

‘When you think about Puritanism, you must begin by getting rid of the slang term ‘Puritanism’ as applied to Victorian religious hypocrisy. This does not apply to seventeenth-century Puritanism.’ – Leland Ryken

‘Issues such as transparency often boil down to which side of – pick a number – 40 you’re on. Under 40, and transparency is generally considered a good thing for society. Over 40, and one generally chooses privacy over transparency. On every side of this issue, hypocrisy abounds.’ – Graydon Carter

‘Hypocrisy is the scarlet letter in politics.’ – Mark McKinnon

‘I get the hypocrisy thing, but any human being is allowed to have a public and private face, and celebrities should have the same rights as regular people to decide what cards they lay down and what cards they hide.’ – Cindy Crawford

‘We’ve never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It’s been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they’re always the enemy.’ – Evgeny Morozov

‘This is the real tragedy of America’s ‘Internet freedom agenda’: It’s going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning.’ – Evgeny Morozov

‘Culturally, I have always been part of the proletariat. I lived side by side with the sons of glassblowers, fishermen and smugglers. The stories they told were shaper satires about the hypocrisy of authority and the middle classes, the two-facedness of teachers and lawyers and politicians. I was born politicized.’ – Dario Fo

‘Boston has carried the practice of hypocrisy to the n-th degree of refinement, grace, and failure.’ – Lincoln Steffens

‘If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that’s brotherhood. But if you – if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that’s not brotherhood, that’s hypocrisy.’ – Malcolm X

‘The hypocrisy and false piety of the deniers aside, the relationships of gays have no effect on heteros. Especially all the heteros who’ve done such a marvelous job of debasing marriage on their own all these many years.’ – John Ridley

‘Journalists who are devoted to strictly factual reporting take particular pleasure from satirical news outlets that have the liberty to laugh and even mock the hypocrisy that reporters and editors must simply observe without comment.’ – Tom Rachman

‘Just pick a political story at random and read the comments. There is no logic or reason on either side – only hypocrisy and hate.’ – Michael Arrington

‘I returned to India because I believe in an India of honesty and hard work, not of corruption and crookedness. I believe in an India of openness and straightforwardness, not of hypocrisy and double-dealing. I believe in an India where opportunities are available to all, and not just to a chosen few.’ – Shashi Tharoor

‘There is a profound hypocrisy – and deep historical ignorance – when Europeans complain about the problems posed by the ethnic and religious minorities in their midst, for that is exactly what European colonial rule meant for peoples around the world.’ – Martin Jacques

‘Nobody can legitimately claim to be a marine ecologist and conservationist while continuing to eat fish. It is the ultimate form of hypocrisy.’ – Paul Watson

‘I just totally do not believe in this sort of Bart Simpson character who infects so much of our literature and film and TV stuff nowadays, these know-it-all kids who seem to understand the hypocrisy of the adult world so thoroughly and can talk about it with such articulateness. That’s bunk.’ – David Small

‘The United States is now harbouring Luis Posada Carriles. His continued freedom mocks victims of terrorism everywhere. It also shows how heavily the ‘war on terror’ is overlaid with politics and hypocrisy.’ – Stephen Kinzer

‘The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues – probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life – even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.’ – Robert Gottlieb

‘Art, like religion, arises from the spirit, but alas, the formalizing of spiritual life all too often ends in hypocrisy.’ – Michael Leunig

‘Evangelical Christian politicians who cheat often raise questions about hypocrisy, especially if they preached piety in public and disregarded it in private. When Jewish politicians fall, they shatter different expectations, particularly that American Jews need to work together to preserve respectability and fireproof against anti-Semitism.’ – Jodi Kantor

‘I consider myself a fairly ethical individual while I do have a lot of dichotomies within me. We’re all victims of our own hypocrisy at times.’ – T. J. Miller

‘I want to tell you this: you cannot get the robe of hypocrisy on you so thick that the sharp eye of childhood will not see through every veil.’ – Robert Green Ingersoll

‘Teenagers, especially girl ones, seem like the perfect canary-in-the-coal-mine characters to me. They capture American culture and its perversion, its hypocrisy – how absorbed we are with youth and beauty and sexualized imagery, for instance, while preaching abstinence and modesty.’ – Antonya Nelson

‘Political hypocrisy and racism make me hot under the collar.’ – Walt Handelsman

‘American hypocrisy consists of thinking that everything is serious; French hypocrisy is to think that nothing is serious.’ – Isabelle Adjani

‘The biggest kick is reading something new and exciting and then getting other people to share your enthusiasm. Beyond all the cant and hypocrisy in publishing, that’s what it’s all about.’ – Sonny Mehta

‘There’s a lot of hypocrisy and condescension in Israel’s institutionalized support for Mubarak’s tyrannical rule, in its backing of a corrupt leader who established a brutal secret police state to suppress his citizens and keep their mouths shut.’ – Sayed Kashua

‘I don’t think there is a life in the mundane 9-to-5 hypocrisy. That’s not living.’ – RuPaul

‘One of the jobs of comedy is to expose hypocrisy. When you look at countries like Iran or North Korea that don’t have freedom of speech, we who do should push it as far as we need to.’ – Maz Jobrani

‘In Judaism, the temple was the most holy site in the world. But if you extend that argument as a metaphor, and you say ‘The world is a holy place,’ and you’re treating this holy place like a money-lending psycho, then Jesus says, ‘This is hypocrisy!’ and he’d point it out and flip it over.’ – Jeff Baena

‘That’s what’s really bothering me about Trump is the hypocrisy, because when Trump was a candidate, and he got elected – because, by and large, he told the truth about the phony nature of the recovery.’ – Peter Schiff

‘Our job every single night is to call out hypocrisy on both sides to make sure we’re holding Republicans accountable and Democrats accountable, that we’re holding the president accountable for promises made.’ – David Muir

‘Moliere exaggerates common vices of mankind: lust, greed, misanthropy, hypocrisy. We all have a touch of these.’ – Dakin Matthews

‘The existence of slavery cast the shadow of hypocrisy over the otherwise noble proclamation of the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in our Declaration of Independence.’ – Blase J. Cupich

‘We’re against hypocrisy, lies, bigotry, show business, insincerity, phonies, and fakers.’ – Ian Brown

‘Both Conservative and Labour politicians in Britain are rather too fond of praising the relative ‘classlessness’ of American society and of urging their own people to emulate it. There is a certain falseness about such arguments, and also a certain hypocrisy.’ – Linda Colley

‘The greatest hypocrisy on the planet right now is for those who defend capitalism to not be in favor of radical transparency, for all of us to know who owns everything. And that is my militant, radical, moderate, pro-capitalist, pro-Enlightenment, ferocious stand.’ – David Brin

‘The wages that are being paid in the Premier League are very tempting. It would be hypocrisy to deny that.’ – Thomas Muller

‘I think defeating Fox – and more importantly, getting the rest of the media to understand they do not do legitimate news – is very important. I hope to do that through pointing out their hypocrisy, propaganda, and general foolishness. But I also plan to beat them in the ratings and make them fear me.’ – Cenk Uygur

‘Everybody should read ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut. This book is about the hypocrisy of war, told in satire, and is hard-hitting and truthful.’ – Kalki Koechlin

‘Conservatives are often fond of La Rochefoucauld’s famous aphorism that ‘Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,’ and so tend to downplay hypocrisy as a sin. But in the marketplace of ideas they champion, hypocrisy may yet turn out to be the deadliest – or costliest – of sins.’ – Bari Weiss

‘Comedy actually works best when you’re living in an OK world, and you are pointing out the hypocrisy in apathy.’ – Tim Minchin

‘I don’t like hypocrisy, I don’t like double standards, it’s probably why i’m vegan.’ – Austin Aries

‘Hypocrisy, something Jesus railed against, has become perhaps the most prominent feature of the religious right in the Trump era.’ – Kirsten Powers

‘We often come across certain directors who mention some of their own flops as their favourites. They will blame the viewers for not realising its merits. I think that is plain hypocrisy.’ – Sreenivasan

‘Everyone wants to be liked. It’s a basic human impulse for some of you, and that explains the turn-on-a-dime hypocrisy from people like Jim Carrey and Sean Penn.’ – Lisa Kennedy Montgomery

‘The whole purpose of Russian propaganda is to show that the U.S. and U.S. politics is filled with hubris and hypocrisy and to show it is not better than anyone else.’ – Fiona Hill

‘In the NBA, it’s wins and losses. You don’t have to deal with some of the hypocrisy of college athletics.’ – Dwane Casey

‘Now that Europe has developed through deforestation and fossil fuel use it is telling Brazil not to develop through deforestation and fossil fuel use. Bolsonaro is the backlash against such hypocrisy.’ – Michael Shellenberger

‘I’m a product of the ’60s and the ’70s – slightly rebellious back then in college, not so much in high school, when I got to college I think I was. And I think a lot of where I’m at right now is rooted in a lot of hypocrisy that I recognized back then that I never wanted to be personally.’ – Joe Maddon

‘Be it at JNU or any institute, students want India to shine. They want the country to get rid of mediocrity and hypocrisy.’ – Vivek Agnihotri

‘Any senator who commits himself or herself to something, should be man or woman enough to take a stand… If they give their word to support something that they are ashamed of, then that is a hypocrisy, and could be interpreted as not wanting to be associated with the matter.’ – Ruben Diaz Sr.

‘I’m a part of the system now and I am helping people within that system and, so, it would be hypocrisy to be part of a system that I don’t believe in.’ – Isaac Wright Jr.

‘Reality show TV star is a familiar job, and to knock it would be the height of hypocrisy for someone like me who has made their career on television.’ – Susanna Reid

‘British Bombs’ is a tune I wrote about the hypocrisy of the British arms trade.’ – Declan McKenna

‘Look at the Rafa Benitez saga at Newcastle. Riddled with hypocrisy.’ – Simon Jordan

‘The NBA’s rank hypocrisy here where it comes to ripping America to shreds while shutting up and dribbling for Chairman Xi and everyone in China has been ripe to be exploited. I give credit to Enes Kanter for succinctly and cogently and intelligently ripping that dichotomy, that hypocrisy.’ – Clay Travis

‘What I have a problem with is these privileged people telling the British people how they should think. I find that rank hypocrisy and condescending, lecturing tone incredibly inappropriate.’ – Suella Braverman