Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Hypocrisy, Hazlitt suggests, isn’t a clever mask but a corrosive self-relationship. The hypocrite “despises those whom he deceives” because deception requires a prior judgment: that the audience is pliable, vain, or dull enough to be managed. Contempt is baked into the performance. Yet Hazlitt’s sharper turn is that the hypocrite “has no respect for himself,” meaning the fraud isn’t only outward-facing; it’s an admission of inner vacancy. If you believed you had real standing, you wouldn’t need the costume.

The punchline - “He would make a dupe of himself too, if he could” - is Hazlitt at his most surgically ironic. It’s not that the hypocrite lacks sincerity; it’s that he lacks the dignity even to believe his own act. Self-deception would be a relief, almost a kind of innocence. But the hypocrite can’t access it, because he knows, at every step, that the moral language he uses is rented. That makes his life a one-man con where the only person unavailable to con is the conman himself.

Context matters: Hazlitt wrote in an England bristling with public moralism and political cant, where respectability was a currency and “virtue” could be a career. As a critic suspicious of piety-as-branding, he’s diagnosing hypocrisy as social domination disguised as principle - and as a psychological punishment. The hypocrite doesn’t just lie; he lives in permanent awareness of the lie, trapped in contempt for everyone in the room, including the one in the mirror.