A Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Politeness, n: The most acceptable hypocrisy.

Ambrose Bierce

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Acceptable Hypocrisy Most Politeness

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Ambrose Bierce
American - Journalist
June 24, 1842 - 1914

There is no such thing as an acceptable level of unemployment, because hunger is not acceptable, poverty is not acceptable, poor health is not acceptable, and a ruined life is not acceptable.

Hubert H. Humphrey

Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.

John Adams

There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.

Yiyun Li

You can do a lot more with weapons and politeness than just politeness.

Vladimir Putin

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

Actually, we have misdefined "hypocrisy." Hypocrisy is not the failure to practice what you preach but the failure to believe it. Hypocrisy is propaganda.

Peter Kreeft

Politeness only teaches us to save others from unnecessary pain.... You are not bound by politeness to tell any falsehoods.

Maria Edgeworth

There is no way to avoid the reality that the American government in the past years has been the most spectacularly hypocrisy-driven government in the world. We rival the Soviet Union in some stages, in some ways, in hypocrisy.

Michael Scheuer

Hypocrisy means deliberately pretending. None of us lives up to his ideals; none of us is all that he would like to be or all that he could be in Christ. But that is not hypocrisy. Falling short of our ideals is not hypocrisy. Pretending we have reached our ideals when we have not - that is hypocrisy.

Warren W. Wiersbe

Most of us are aware of and pretend to detest the barefaced instances of that hypocrisy by which men deceive others, but few of us are upon our guard or see that more fatal hypocrisy by which we deceive and over-reach our own hearts.

Laurence Sterne

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

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

William Hazlitt

Politeness has been defined to be artificial good-nature; but we may affirm, with much greater propriety, that good-nature is natural politeness.

Stanislaw I Leszczynski

True politeness is to social life what oil is to machinery, a thing to oil the ruts and grooves of existence. False politeness can shine without warming and glitter without vivifying.

Frances Harper

To the acquisition of the rare quality of politeness, so much of the enlightened understanding is necessary that I cannot but consider every book in every science, which tends to make us wiser, and of course better men, as a treatise on a more enlarged system of politeness.

Harold Monro

Hypocrisy is bad, but it's not the worst vice in the world. If I declared “murder is wrong” and then killed somebody, I would hope that the top count against me would be homicide, not hypocrisy. Liberal elites ' particularly in Hollywood ' believe that hypocrisy is the gravest sin in the world, which is why they advocate their own lifestyles for the entire world: Sleep with whomever you want, listen to your own instincts, be true to yourself, blah, blah, blah. Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.

Jonah Goldberg

A Quote by Ambrose Bierce

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