F. Marion Crawford

A community of vices is a closer and more direct bond between human beings than a community of virtues. This may be because vice needs solidarity among those who yield to it in order to be tolerated at all, whereas virtue is its own reward, as the proverb says, and is happily very often its own protection — far more often than not, in our day.

Francis Marion Crawford, The Novel: What It Is (1893), p. 40.