“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.”
This quote has no known author and is recorded as an anonymous proverb.
About this quote
La Rochefoucauld collected his Maxims after the collapse of his political career, when he had spent years watching the court he once served. The sentence is his most economical reading of that court: private vice only feels safe in a society that still performs virtue in public.
Source: Maxims