Browsing Topic Best Knavery Quotes

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

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

A thorough-paced knave will rarely quarrel with one whom he can cheat: his revenge is plunder; therefore he is usually the most forgiving of beings, upon the principle that if he come to an open rupture, he must defend himself; and this does not suit a man whose vocation it is to keep his hands in the pocket of another.

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

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

Knaves starve not in the land of fools.

Instead of recognizing the State as ‘the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men,’ the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent. The mass-man, ignorant of its history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and in that faith he is willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its administrators may draw at will.

It is much easier to ruin a man of principle than a man of none, for he may be ruined through his scruples. Knavery is supple and can bend; but honesty is firm and upright, and yields not.

It is a curious paradox that precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity, to those mysterious powers assumed by others; and in those regions of darkness and ignorance where man cannot effect even those things that are within the power of man, there we shall ever find that a blind belief in feats that are far beyond those powers has taken the deepest root in the minds of the deceived, and produced the richest harvest to the knavery of the deceiver.

Honesty is not only the deepest policy, but the highest wisdom; since, however difficult it may be for integrity to get on, it is a thousand times more difficult for knavery to get off; and no error is more fatal than that of those who think that Virtue has no other reward because they have heard that she is her own.

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

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

If one of you sees, sometime, something unedifying and so much as goes on to pass it on and put it into the heart of another brother, in doing so you not only harm yourself but you harm your brother by putting one more little bit of knavery into his heart. Even if that brother has his mind set on prayer or some other noble activity, and the first arrives and furnishes him with something to prate about, he not only impedes what he ought to be doing, but brings a temptation on him. There is nothing graver or more deadly than this doing harm, not only to himself but also to his neighbor.

Knavery seems to be so much a the striking feature of its inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to this kingdom.

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.

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

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 for a good purpose: knavery adds malice to falsehood.

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

He who esteems the Virginia reel A bait to draw saints from their spiritual weal, And regards the quadrille as a far greater knavery Than crushing His African children with slavery, Since all who take part in a waltz or cotillon Are mounted for hell on the devil’s own pillion, Who, as every true orthodox Christian well knows, Approaches the heart through the door of the toes.

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

Knavery is ever suspicious of knavery.

Even knaves may be made good for something.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Knavery is the best defense against a knave.

Knavery and flattery are blood relations.

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