Knavery Quotes

Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.

Knavery is the best defense against a knave.

Cunning leads to knavery. It is but a step from one to the other, and that very slippery. Only lying makes the difference; add that to cunning, and it is knavery.

Very often, say what you will, a knave is only a fool.

A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.

Knaves starve not in the land of fools.

Fashion--a word which knaves and fools may use, Their knavery and folly to excuse.

Knavery and flattery are blood relations.

Our own distrust gives a fair pretence for the knavery of other people.

I should think this a gull, but that the white-bearded fellow speaks it; knavery cannot, sure, hide himself in such reverence.

Knavery is supple, and can bend, but honesty is firm and upright and yields not.

We never deceive for a good purpose: knavery adds malice to falsehood.

Zeno first started that doctrine, that knavery is the best defence against a knave.

A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.

Even knaves may be made good for something.

Now I will show myselfTo have more of the serpent than the dove;That is--more knave than fool.

By fools, knaves fatten; by bigots, priests are well clothed; every knave finds a gull.

Knavery's plain face is never seen till used.

The worst of all knaves are those who can mimic their former honesty.

While I live, no rich or noble knave shall walk the world in credit to his grave.

Knaves will thrive when honest plainness knows not how to live.

There's never a villain dwelling in all Denmark But he's an arrant knave.

A brave world, sir, full of religion, knavery, and change: we shall shortly see better days.

Knavery is ever suspicious of knavery.

There are cases in which a man would be ashamed not to have been imposed upon. There is a confidence necessary to human intercourse, and without which men are often more injured by their own suspicions than they would be by the perfidy of others.

We never deceive people to benefit them, for knavery is a compound of wickedness and falsehood.

It is more rational to suspect knavery and folly than to discount, at a stroke, everything that past experience has taught me about the way things actually work