#hypocrisy

But I knew the way the people in the town thought about things. They always had some time left over from their life to bother about other people and what they did. They thought they had to get together to help other people out, like the time they got together about the woman who let a colored man borrow her car and told her the best place for her was up north with all the other nigger lovers, and the time they got the veterans with overseas wives out. If you were different from anybody in town, you had to get out. That's why everybody was so much alike. The way they talked, what they did, what they liked, what they hated. If somebody got to hate something and he was the right person, everybody had to hate it too, or people began to hate the ones who didn't hate it. They used to tell us in school to think for yourself, but you couldn't do that in the town. You had to think what your father thought all his life, and that was what everybody thought. ↗

— John Kennedy Toole

#hypocrisy #small-town-life #life

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#moral #hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together. ↗

— Scott Meyer

#hypocrisy #society #humor

He's in love with the notion of shame and he traffics the shit like a schoolground pusher, spreading it around but never personally using. ↗

— Miriam Toews

#love

Philip wasn't the sort of man to make a friend of a woman. He wanted devotion. I gave him that. I did, you know. But I couldn't stand being made a fool of. I couldn;t stand being put on probation, like an office-boy, to see if I was good enough to be condescended to. I quite thought he was honest when he said he didn't believe in marriage -- and then it turned out that it was a test, to see whether my devotion was abject enough. Well, it wasn't. I didn't like having matrimony offered as a bad-conduct prize. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#hypocrisy #matrimony #marriage

When you turn your back on hypocrisy and do nothing you don’t change the hearts of others you change yours. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#change

As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#bigotry #despotism #equality #hypocrisy #know-nothings

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance (...); as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out [in his History of England], she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#clichés #dignity #equality #fiction #gender

Creating some god for one's inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if did not. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#inspirational

[M]en, though they know full well how much women are worth and how great the benefits we bring them, nonetheless seek to destroy us out of envy for our merits. It's just like the crow, when it produces white nestlings: it is so stricken by envy, knowing how black it is itself, that it kills its own offspring out of pique. ↗

— Moderata Fonte

#dignity #empowerment #envy #feminism #gender