Life & Wisdom Quote by Augustus Hare

Hare’s line is a neat little indictment of our moral eyesight: it’s not that we can’t tell right from wrong, it’s that we reliably mis-measure it. “Crimes” are loud. They arrive with a scene, a victim, a headline, a courtroom. They’re built for shock, and Hare suggests they can even overshoot their proper scale, turning into spectacle that paralyzes judgment. “Vices,” by contrast, are quiet and habitual. They come dressed as personality, tradition, stress relief, harmless fun. We “almost always” underreact because vices don’t demand a siren; they ask for accommodation.

The intent isn’t to excuse crime or to moralize in the abstract. It’s to expose a public hypocrisy: we reserve our outrage for violations that are discrete and prosecutable, while giving a pass to the slow-drip behaviors that corrode character and community. The subtext is Victorian but still recognizable: a society obsessed with respectability can treat private cruelty, addiction, vanity, snobbery, and casual dishonesty as mere quirks, then act astonished when those softened habits harden into harm.

Hare, a writer of a certain Anglican-tinged, late-19th-century sensibility, is also taking a swipe at moral theater. Public “shock” can be self-congratulatory; it proves you’re the kind of person who is shocked. Underreacting to vice is more comfortable because it would require confronting the ordinary, compromised self - and the ordinary, compromised institutions we live inside. The sentence works because it flips the expected hierarchy: the real scandal isn’t the crime we can’t stop staring at, but the vice we’ve trained ourselves not to see.