“ 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- Copy
- 869
“ There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon. ”
- Samuel Butler- Copy
- 3.5K
“ The heart never grows better by age; I fear rather worse, always harder. A young liar will be an old one, and a young knave will only be a greater knave as he grows older. ”
- Lord Chesterfield- Copy
- 2.2K
“ A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition. ”
- Earl of Kent- Copy
- 3.7K
“ Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity than straigthforward and simple integrity in another. A knave would rather quarrel with a brother knave than with a fool, but he would rather avoid a quarrel with one honest man than with both… ”
- C. C. Colton- Copy
- 187
“ Now will I show myself to have more of the serpent than the dove; that is, more knave than fool. ”
- Christopher Marlowe- Copy
- 2.6K
“ No cheating bastards will I talk to; I will not talk to any cheating bastards! ”
- Brian Clough- Copy
- 156
“ I am bewitched with the rogue's company. If the rascal have not given me medicines to make me love him, I'll be hanged. ”
- William Shakespeare- Copy
- 1.5K
“ HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. ”
- Ambrose Bierce- Copy
- 2.8K
“ I will be hanged if some eternal villain, Some busy and insinuating rogue, Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office, Have not devised this slander. ”
- William Shakespeare- Copy
- 1.9K
“ You have to be a bastard to make it, and that's a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth. ”
- John Lennon- Copy
- 3K
“ The same ambition can destroy or save, and make a patriot as it makes a knave. ”
- Alexander Pope- Copy
- 2.6K
“ It is a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave. ”
- David Hume- Copy
- 3.7K
“ Who friendship with a knave hath made, is judged a partner in the trade. ”
- John Gay- Copy
- 2.7K
“ We are no more free agents than the queen of clubs when she victoriously takes prisoner the knave of hearts. ”
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu- Copy
- 2.1K
“ He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave. ”
- George Berkeley- Copy
- 1.1K
“ He that has no fools, knaves, nor beggars in his family was begot by a flash of lightning. ”
- Thomas Fuller- Copy
- 3.2K
“ This is the excellent foppery of the world: that when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeits of our own behavior — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence… ”
- William Shakespeare- Copy
- 3.9K
“ Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. ”
- Edmund Burke- Copy
- 3.5K
“ I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike — and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two — are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked. ”
- Harold Bloom- Copy
- 2.6K
“ A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer — that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two. ”
- William Hazlitt- Copy
- 3.9K
- 1