Daily Inspiration Quote by Finley Peter Dunne

“Vice” shows up here less as a moral category than as a marketing problem: it looks disgusting at first, then becomes strangely lovable through repetition. Dunne, a journalist with a satirist’s eye for civic hypocrisy, is poking at the way disgust erodes on contact. The line borrows the cadence of old moral verse, but it’s weaponized to make the opposite point: that the culture of condemnation is flimsy, and that our revulsions are often just unfamiliarity posing as principle.

The intent is not to defend wrongdoing so much as to diagnose the mechanism by which people normalize it. “Hideous mien” evokes the sermon, the temperance poster, the caricature of sin as physically repulsive. Then the pivot - “the more you see it the better you like it” - lands with a cynical shrug: exposure doesn’t merely desensitize; it seduces. Vice becomes a habit, then a comfort, then a piece of identity. Dunne’s implied target isn’t the “bad” person; it’s the respectable observer who insists they’re immune while quietly acclimating.

Context matters. Dunne wrote in an America where urban politics, saloons, and public virtue campaigns collided daily, and where journalism itself trafficked in sensationalism while pretending to police it. The subtext is journalistic self-implication: the press that repeatedly displays corruption and scandal can end up laundering it into entertainment, even affection. In that sense, the line feels uncomfortably modern: repetition doesn’t just inform the public; it teaches the public what to tolerate, and eventually what to crave.