Top 83 Quotes About Knaves
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. The credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves.
Edmund Burke
#4. Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.
Jonathan Swift
#5. Wickedness may prosper for awhile, but in the long run, he that sets all the knaves at work will pay them.
Roger L'Estrange
#7. 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
#8. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. There will be nothing you may not aspire to; you will go everywhere, and you will find out what the world is - an assemblage of fools and knaves.
Honore De Balzac
#16. 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
#17. History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
Ambrose Bierce
#19. If I be drunk, I'll be drunk with those that have the fear of God, and not with drunken knaves.
William Shakespeare
#20. 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
#21. Honest men are the soft easy cushions on which knaves repose and fatten.
Thomas Otway
#23. Who are next to knaves? Those that converse with them.
Alexander Pope
#24. Fashion
a word which knaves and fools may use, Their knavery and folly to excuse.
Charles Churchill
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
Samuel Butler
#30. Booksellers in the gross are taken for little better than a pack of knaves and atheists.
John Dunton
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. When Knaves betray each other, one can scarce be blamed or the other pitied.
Benjamin Franklin
#34. If a man can hear the truth he's spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools ...
Rudyard Kipling
#35. 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
#36. Knaves will thrive when honest plainness knows not how to live.
James Shirley
#37. Power, when invested in the hands of knaves or fools, generally is the source of tyranny ...
Charlotte Charke
#38. 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
#39. Knaves will come and knaves will go.
James Cook
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Bold knaves thrive without one grain of sense,
But good men starve for want of impudence.
John Dryden
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Even virtue followed beyond reason's rule May stamp the just man knave, the sage a fool.
Horace
#51. 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
#52. Who friendship with a knave hath made, Is judged a partner in the trade.
John Gay
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Better be a foole then a knave.
[Better be a fool than a knave.]
George Herbert
#56. He that cheats another is a knave; but he that cheats himself is a fool.
Karl G. Maeser
#57. 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
#58. I am always afraid of a fool. One cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well.
William Hazlitt
#59. Zeno first started that doctrine, that knavery is the best defence against a knave.
Plutarch
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. The heart never grows better with age; I fear rather worse, always harder.
Lord Chesterfield
#64. 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
#65. Knavery is the best defense against a knave.
Plutarch
#66. Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.
George Berkeley
#67. I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
Harold Bloom
#68. The best way to deceive a knave is to tell him the truth.
Ivan Panin
#69. Now I will show myselfTo have more of the serpent than the dove;That is
more knave than fool.
Christopher Marlowe
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant
John Barth
#73. Anyone who pretends not to be interested in money is either a fool or a knave.
Patricia Wentworth
#74. 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
#75. It is far more easy to acquire a fortune like a knave, than to expend it, like a gentleman.
Charles Caleb Colton
#76. None are so busy as the fool and the knave.
John Dryden
#78. A fool is often as dangerous to deal with as a knave, and always more incorrigible.
Charles Caleb Colton
#79. When a knave is in a plumtree he hath neither friend nor kin.
George Herbert
#80. There's never a villain dwelling in all Denmark But he's an arrant knave.
William Shakespeare
#82. The Man who pretends to be a modest enquirer into the truth of a self-evident thing is a Knave.
William Blake
#83. An honest man, sir, is able to speak for himself, when a knave is not.
William Shakespeare
