Quotes about hypocrisy

We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.

In the fifteenth century men cross-examined and tormented a man because he preached some immoral attitude; in the nineteenth century we feted and flattered Oscar Wilde because he preached such an attitude, and then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out. It may be a question which of the two methods was the more cruel; there can be no kind of question which was the more ludicrous. The age of the Inquisition has not at least the disgrace of having produced a society which made an idol of the very same man for preaching the very same things which it made him a convict for practising.

Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.

Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.

— By Jesus, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will.

He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.

— I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that? No. And do you know why?

He frowned sternly on the bright air.

— Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.

— Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.

A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, his lifted arms waving to the air.

— She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That’s why.

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.

Nor did I learn about sex from any reasoned source of instruction. I learned about it from the distorted and imperfect knowledge of other boys. This is the usual fate enforced upon youngsters by a society that is too prim and too hypocritical to have sex taught like any other branch of knowledge.

Considering how important sex is, how great a source of joy, how enormous a source of misery and disease, how is permeates the workings of courtship and marriage, isn’t it strange that we go to great lengths to teach our children to play football and make no effort whatever to teach them to play sex?

I have a horror of funerals, not only because I dislike anything unpleasant but also because I detect a tang of hypocrisy to the whole thing. As soon as someone dies, he or she becomes transformed into a miracle of angelic behavior and personality which in life was never true, and everyone puts on an attitude of deep sorrow which, in truth, he or she might not feel.

The trouble is that I am one of the common breed of human being who finds it very easy to strew noble little homilies far and wide but considerably less easy to follow those homilies himself.

You know that prudery is only the other side of prurience. The words are even on the same page in the dictionary.