Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.

François VI de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), a French aristocrat shaped by court politics and the civil wars of the Fronde, distilled his observations of social life into terse moral maxims. The line is one of his best-known reflections on the performative nature of virtue in elite society: even those acting from selfish or corrupt motives often feel compelled to adopt the language and outward signs of moral goodness. In the milieu of Louis XIV’s France—where reputation, manners, and appearances were crucial—hypocrisy could function as a social currency, signaling that virtue remained the acknowledged standard even when privately ignored.

The maxim suggests that hypocrisy, though morally blameworthy, indirectly testifies to the authority of virtue. If vice must disguise itself as virtue to be accepted, then virtue retains cultural prestige and normative power. La Rochefoucauld’s irony is double-edged: he exposes the self-interest behind many public displays of goodness, yet he also implies that society’s moral ideals exert real pressure, forcing wrongdoers to pay “tribute” through imitation. The saying thus critiques moral posturing while acknowledging that shared standards of virtue can restrain or at least mask vice, revealing how ethics and social approval intertwine.

“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.”
“Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.”
French: “L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu.”