"Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue"
About this Quote
Hypocrisy, in La Rochefoucauld's hands, isn’t a personal flaw so much as a social transaction: even the shameless still feel compelled to speak the language of goodness. The line lands with the cold elegance of a moral anatomist. Vice doesn’t apologize, repent, or even really hide; it flatters virtue by pretending to care about it. That pretense is the “homage” - a bow made not out of respect, but out of necessity. If you have to counterfeit virtue to move through society, virtue has already won a kind of victory: it sets the price of admission.
The subtext is nastier than it first appears. It suggests that our public moral codes are less about becoming better than about maintaining a shared performance where everyone knows the script. Hypocrisy becomes proof of virtue’s power, but also evidence of how thin that power can be: virtue is influential enough to demand lip service, not strong enough to prevent the wrongdoing. That tension is exactly where the aphorism gets its bite.
Context matters. La Rochefoucauld wrote from inside the high-stakes theater of the French court, where reputation was currency and sincerity could be a liability. His Maxims are built for a world in which self-interest is the default setting and morality often functions as etiquette. The genius is the inversion: instead of condemning hypocrisy as a collapse of standards, he reads it as the backhanded compliment that keeps those standards in circulation.
The subtext is nastier than it first appears. It suggests that our public moral codes are less about becoming better than about maintaining a shared performance where everyone knows the script. Hypocrisy becomes proof of virtue’s power, but also evidence of how thin that power can be: virtue is influential enough to demand lip service, not strong enough to prevent the wrongdoing. That tension is exactly where the aphorism gets its bite.
Context matters. La Rochefoucauld wrote from inside the high-stakes theater of the French court, where reputation was currency and sincerity could be a liability. His Maxims are built for a world in which self-interest is the default setting and morality often functions as etiquette. The genius is the inversion: instead of condemning hypocrisy as a collapse of standards, he reads it as the backhanded compliment that keeps those standards in circulation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|---|
| Source | François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes (1665). English rendering: "Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue." French original: "L'hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu." |
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