Knaves Quotes & Sayings

Hanifs (Muslims) are stumbling, Christians all astray
Jews wildered, Magians far on error's way.
We mortals are composed of two great schools
Enlightened knaves or else religious fools. — Al-Ma'arri

The events we have passed through form a coherent pattern and the political actors who have shaped the world are rational
if not necessarily moral or decent
actors. Americans tend to think of its leaders as fools and knaves and of its enemies as psychotic. This seems to comfort us. While America's leaders might be knaves, they are not fools, and while our enemies might have utterly different moral values that are repugnant to us, they are far from insane. — George Friedman

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike — Harold Bloom

By fools, knaves fatten; by bigots, priests are well clothed; every knave finds a gull. — Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

Even knaves may be made good for something. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

But to such a man as Schopenhauer, - one who considered five sixths of the population to be knaves or blockheads, and who had thought out a system for the remaining fraction, - to such a man as he, the question of esteem, or the lack thereof, was of small consequence. He cared nothing for the existence which he led in the minds of other people. To his own self he was true, to the calling of his destiny constant, and he felt that he could sit and snap his fingers at the world, knowing that Time, who is at least a gentleman, would bring him his due unasked. — Edgar Saltus

We are arrant knaves all, believe none of us. — William Shakespeare

Despoilers obey the Malthusian law; they multiply with the means of existence, and the means of existence of knaves is the credulity of their dupes. — Frederic Bastiat

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

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

Who friendship with a knave hath made, Is judged a partner in the trade. — John Gay

Political convictions then were of the utmost importance, so intensely felt that it was difficult even for well-balanced and temperate men to think of the opposition party without bitterness. To the rank and file of the Federalists, the Democrats seemed a vulgar, ignorant mob at best, at worst a group of "knaves and blockheads." To the Democrats, the Federalists appeared abandoned traitors fawning at the feet of the British government, a blindly selfish aristocracy who deserved little better treatment than the French nobility had received a few years before during the Reign of Terror. — William Edward Buckley

Though we may not desire to detect fraud, we must not, on that account, endeavor to be insensible of it, for, as cunning is a crime, so is duplicity a fault, and if men dread knaves, they also despise fools. — Norm MacDonald

If I be drunk, I'll be drunk with those that have the fear of God, and not with drunken knaves. — William Shakespeare

Avoid the politic, the factious fool,
The busy, buzzing, talking harden'd knave;
The quaint smooth rogue that sins against his reason,
Calls saucy loud sedition public zeal,
And mutiny the dictates of his spirit. — Thomas Otway

Give fools their gold, and knaves their power; let fortune's bubbles rise and fall; who sows a field, or trains a flower, or plants a tree, is more than all. — John Greenleaf Whittier

It is far more easy to acquire a fortune like a knave, than to expend it, like a gentleman. — Charles Caleb Colton

Booksellers in the gross are taken for little better than a pack of knaves and atheists. — John Dunton

When Knaves betray each other, one can scarce be blamed or the other pitied. — Benjamin Franklin

If a man can hear the truth he's spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools ... — Rudyard Kipling

The great chastisement of a knave is not to be known, but to know himself. — Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

The Man who pretends to be a modest enquirer into the truth of a self-evident thing is a Knave. — William Blake

A king may spille, a king may save; A king may make of lorde a knave; And of a knave a lorde also. — John Gower

You are not worth another word, else I'd call you knave. — William Shakespeare

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune,
often the surfeit
of our own behavior,
we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star. — William Shakespeare

Knavery is the best defense against a knave. — Plutarch

Knaves starve not in the land of fools. — Charles Churchill

Most Men are Cowards, all Men should be Knaves.
The Difference lies, as far as I can see,
Not in the thing it self, but the Degree. — John Wilmot

To get rid of villains and knaves, it is necessary to give them a way out. If you don't give them any leeway at all, they will be like trapped rats. If every way out is closed to them, they will chew up everything good. — Zicheng Hong

Aunt Ruth looked at the unlucky pair.
"What are you doing here?" she asked Perry.
Stovepipe Town made a mistake.
"Oh, looking for a round square," said Perry off-handedly, his eyes suddenly becoming limpid with mischief and lawless roguery. — L.M. Montgomery

What do we see by [our enlightened age] which our ancestors saw not, and which at the same time is worth seeing? We see a hundred men hanged, where they saw one. We see five hundred transported, where they saw one. We see five thousand in the workhouse, where they saw one ... We see children perishing in manufactories, where they saw them flourishing in the fields. We see prisons, where they saw castles. We see masters, where they saw representatives. In short, they saw true men, where we see false knaves. They saw Milton, and we see Mr. Sackbut. — Thomas Love Peacock

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools ... — Rudyard Kipling

He that cheats another is a knave; but he that cheats himself is a fool. — Karl G. Maeser

Alas! how has the social spirit of Christianity been perverted by fools at one time, and by knaves and bigots at another; by the self-tormentors of the cell, and the all-tormentors of the conclave! — Charles Caleb Colton

That man is thought a dangerous knave, Or zealot plotting crime, Who for advancement of his kind Is wiser than his time. — Douglas William Jerrold

In the mass of mankind, I fear, there is too great a majority of fools and knaves; who, singly from their number, must to a certain degree be respected, though they are by no means respectable. — Lord Chesterfield

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon. — Samuel Butler

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

O heart, be at peace, because
Nor knave nor dolt can break
What's not for their applause,
Being for a woman's sake. — William Butler Yeats

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

This is some fellow,
Who having been prais'd for bluntness, doth affect
A saucy roughness and constrains the garb
Quite from his nature: he can't flatter, he!
An honest mind and plain,
he must speak truth!
And they will take it so; if not he's plain.
These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness
Harbor more craft, and far corrupter ends,
Than twenty silly, ducking observants,
That stretch their duty nicely. — William Shakespeare

This is in thee a nature but infected;
A poor unmanly melancholy sprung
From change of fortune. Why this spade? this place?
This slave-like habit? and these looks of care?
Thy flatterers yet wear silk, drink wine, lie soft;
Hug their diseased perfumes, and have forgot
That ever Timon was. Shame not these woods,
By putting on the cunning of a carper.
Be thou a flatterer now, and seek to thrive
By that which has undone thee: hinge thy knee,
And let his very breath, whom thou'lt observe,
Blow off thy cap; praise his most vicious strain,
And call it excellent: thou wast told thus;
Thou gavest thine ears like tapsters that bid welcome
To knaves and all approachers: 'tis most just
That thou turn rascal; hadst thou wealth again,
Rascals should have 't. Do not assume my likeness. — William Shakespeare

Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. — Herman Melville

The credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves. — Edmund Burke

Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension. — Jonathan Swift

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

A right mind and generous affection hath more beauty and charms than all other symmetries in the world besides; and a grain of honesty and native worth is of more value than all the adventitious ornaments, estates, or preferments; for the sake of which some of the better sort so oft turn knaves. — Anthony Ashley Cooper

Wickedness may prosper for awhile, but in the long run, he that sets all the knaves at work will pay them. — Roger L'Estrange

The worst of all knaves are those who can mimic their former honesty. — Johann Kaspar Lavater

If yee would know a knave, give him a staffe. — George Herbert

And everyone would climb the stairs chuckling to their rooms and dream of aces and knaves and a supply of trumps that would last for ever and ever, one trump after another, an invincible superiority subject to neither change nor decay nor old age, for a trump will always be a trump, come what may. — J.G. Farrell

To be born in imbecility, in the midst of pain and crisis; to be the plaything of ignorance, error, need, sickness, wickedness, and passions; to return step by step to imbecility, from the time of lisping to that of doting; to live among knaves and charlatans of all kinds; to die between one man who takes your pulse and another who troubles your head; never to know where you come from, why you come and where you are going! That is what is called the most important gift of our parents and nature. Life. — Denis Diderot

No flattery, boy! an honest man cannot live by it; it is a little, sneaking art, which knaves use to cajole and soften fools withal. — Thomas Otway

Knaves need to be dealt with as quickly as possible. But as long as their contributions match their outlandish egos, divas should be tolerated and even protected. — Eric Schmidt

So long as women are slaves, men will be knaves. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Who are next to knaves? Those that converse with them. — Alexander Pope

Money does all things,
for it gives and it takes away; it makes honest men and knaves, fools and philosophers; and so forward, mutatis mutandis, to the end of the chapter. — Roger L'Estrange

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant — John Barth

Honest men are the soft easy cushions on which knaves repose and fatten. — Thomas Otway

The heart never grows better with age; I fear rather worse, always harder. — Lord Chesterfield

Mankind are a herd of knaves and fools. It is necessary to join the crowd, or get out of their way, in order not to be trampled to death by them. — William Hazlitt

The roads that lead young men to war are not political roads, or national and international roads, but individual roads. What propels young men to combat is not the draft. Those who are not destined for armed combat usually will not be drafted for armed combat. The pool of human resources is vast, and the number of riflemen is small. The person who wants to avoid the draft will avoid it. And, in Vietnam, as the war went on, the numbers who successfully avoided the draft increased. So who fights? The fools, the uneducated, the knaves? I was none of these - or so I maintain. But I fought. — James R. McDonough

Joliffe knew their audience was with them when Christ declared at the money-changers, "You knaves! You thieves and rascals! Defaming the Lord God's honor as you do! Making his house into a den of thieves and taking what is not yours to take, like shepherds never shearing but butchering every sheep!" and among the lookers-on heads turned and some people pointed at Father Hewgo standing at his church door, glaring, his arms tightly folded aross his chest, well apart from it all but making sure his disapproval lowered over everything. Joliffe had not written the lines at him but might as well have because his parishioners surely saw a match; there was even scattered laughter that would do nothing to soften him toward the players. — Margaret Frazer

I am always afraid of a fool. One cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well. — William Hazlitt

It means that you two, precious father and son, would be a pair of knaves if you had sense enough; but, failing in that, you are only a pair of fools! — E.D.E.N. Southworth

Innate ideas are in every man, born with him; they are truly himself. The man who says that we have no innate ideas must be a fool and knave, having no conscience or innate science. — William Blake

Power, when invested in the hands of knaves or fools, generally is the source of tyranny ... — Charlotte Charke

Negro equality, Fudge!! How long in the Government of a God great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue to be knaves to vend and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagoguism as this? — Abraham Lincoln

Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout. — George Berkeley

Revenge is a debt, in the paying of which the greatest knave is honest and sincere, and, so far as he is able, punctual. — Charles Caleb Colton

Even virtue followed beyond reason's rule May stamp the just man knave, the sage a fool. — Horace

You shall mark
Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave
That, doting on his own obsequious bondage,
Wears out his time, much like his master's ass,
For nought but provender; and when he's old, cashier'd:
Whip me such honest knaves. — William Shakespeare

You will be amused when you see that I have more than once deceived without the slightest qualm of conscience, both knaves and fools. — Giacomo Casanova

In all conditions of life a poor man is a near neighbor to an honest one, and a rich man is as little removed from a knave. — Jean De La Bruyere

You needn't worry about me. I know enough to do what every man ought to do in wartime when he's watched and threatened by bullies. I conceal my feelings; lie whenever necessary; pretend to admire the rascals who've ruined our city and our country; cheer dolts, bullies and knaves and damn all wise temperate men! — Kenneth Roberts

He that dies a martyr proves that he was not a knave, but by no means that he was not a fool. — Charles Caleb Colton

None are so busy as the fool and the knave. — John Dryden

History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools. — Ambrose Bierce

God's ways seem dark, but, soon or late, They touch the shining hills of day; The evil cannot brook delay, The good can well afford to wait, Give ermined knaves their hour of crime; Yet have the future grand and great, The safe appeal of Truth to Time! — John Greenleaf Whittier

Knaves will come and knaves will go. — James Cook

Aha! What villains are these, that trespass upon my private lands! Come to scorn at my fall, perchance? Draw, you knaves, you dogs! — J.K. Rowling

Water of life is gonna flow again/changed from the blood of heroes and knaves/Word mercy's gonna have a new meaning/ when we are judged by the children of our slaves. — Bruce Cockburn

When a knave is in a plumtree he hath neither friend nor kin. — George Herbert

Officers, what offence have these men done?
DOGBERRY
Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have
belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves. — William Shakespeare

Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools? — Thomas Love Peacock

I hold it to be one of the distinguishing excellences of elective over hereditary successions that the talents which nature has provided in sufficient proportion, should be selected by the society for the govenment of their affairs, rather than that this should be be transmitted through the loins of knaves and fools passing from the debauches of the table to those of the bed. — Thomas Jefferson

It should seem that indolence itself would incline a person to be honest, as it requires infinitely greater pains and contrivance to be a knave. — William Shenstone

Lastly, they must be men of honest report, whose life and sound conversation are by their deeds perfectly tried and sufficiently witnessed of unto the people: and finally, they must be such as bear authority, and not be despised as rascal and vile knaves. — Heinrich Bullinger

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things. — Christian Nestell Bovee

Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Knaves are not to be confused with divas. Knavish behavior is a product of low integrity; diva-ish behavior is one of high exceptionalism. Knaves prioritize the individual over the team; divas think they are better than the team, but want success equally for both. Knaves need to be dealt with as quickly as possible. — Eric Schmidt

When the Many are rulers, it cannot but be that, again, knavery is bred in the state; but now the knaves do not grow to hate one another - they become fast friends. For they combine together to maladminister the public concerns. This goes on until one man takes charge of affairs for the Many and puts a stop to the knaves. As a result of this, he wins the admiration of the Many, and, being so admired, lo! you have your despot again; — Herodotus

When I contemplate the natural dignity of man, when I feel (for nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honour and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon. — Thomas Paine

How easy it is to call rogue and villain, and that wittily! But how hard to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of those opprobrious terms! Tosparethegrossness ofthenames, and to dothe thing yet moreseverely, isto drawa full face, and tomake the nose and cheeks stand out, and yet not to employ any depth of shadowing. — John Dryden

The art of manipulating public opinion, which is a necessary art for the democratic politician, and, like other arts, is sometimespractised with greater virtuosity by knaves than by honest men (who are apt to disdain it), has a different technique in different countries. For instance, in England we excel in whitewashing: in America they excel in tarring and feathering. We strain our nerves and stretch our consciences to avoid a scandal: Americans do the same to make one. — George Bernard Shaw

Conspiracies, since they cannot be engaged in without the fellowship of others, are for that reason most perilous; for as most men are either fools or knaves, we run excessive risk in making such folk our companions. — Francesco Guicciardini

Better be a foole then a knave.
[Better be a fool than a knave.] — George Herbert

Barristan Semly was not a bookish man, but he had often glanced through the pages of the White Book, where the deeds of his predecessors had been recorded. Some had been heroes, some weaklings, knaves, or cravens. Most were only men - quicker and stronger than most, more skilled with sword and shield, but still prey to pride, ambition, lust, love, anger, jealousy, greed for gold, hunger for power, and all the other failing that afflicted lesser mortals. The best of them overcame their flaws, did their duty, and died with their swords in their hands. The worst ...
The worst were those who played the game of thrones. — George R R Martin

A fool is often as dangerous to deal with as a knave, and always more incorrigible. — Charles Caleb Colton

An honest man, sir, is able to speak for himself, when a knave is not. — William Shakespeare