Knavery Quotes - Page 2

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

  Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

  Gulls, Knaves, Fool

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• 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.

  Albert J. Nock

  Running, Character, Men

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• The liar is no whit better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander he may be worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Liars, Men, May

  The Man with the Muck-rake, delivered 14 April 1906

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

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  People, Giving, Distrust

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• An entirely honest man, in the severe sense of the word, exists no more than an entirely dishonest knave: the best and the worst are only approximations of those qualities. Who are those that never contradict themselves? yet honesty never contradicts itself: Who are those that always contradict themselves? yet knavery is mere self-contradiction. Thus the knowledge of man determines not the things themselves, but their proportions, the quan∣tum of congruities and incongruities.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Honesty, Men, Self

  "Aphorisms on man. Translated from the original manuscript of the Rev. John Caspar Lavater, citizen of Zuric. ; [One line from Juvenal]" by Johann Kaspar Lavater, 1790.

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• 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.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Taken, Ignorance, Men

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”

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• 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.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Honesty, Integrity, Thinking

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”

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

  Jean de la Bruyere

  People, Deception, Wickedness

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

  William Shakespeare

  Thinking, White, Gulls

  William Shakespeare (1842). “The Works of William Shakspeare: The Text Formed from an Intirely New Collation of the Old Editions, with the Various Readings, Notes, a Life of the Poet, and a History of the Early English Stage”, p.218

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• Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.

  Steven Pinker

  Dream, Selfish, Book

  "How the Mind Works". Book by Steven Pinker, 1997.

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• For my part, I am very much more afraid of the man who does a bad thing and does not know it is bad than of the man who does a bad thing and knows it is bad; because I think that in public affairs stupidity is more dangerous than knavery, because harder to fight and dislodge.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Fighting, Government, Stupidity

  "The New Freedom".

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• 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

  David Hume

  Past, Way, Taught

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• 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.

  Dorotheus of Gaza

  Christian, Brother, Prayer

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• 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.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Honesty, Men, Yield

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”

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• 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.

  James Russell Lowell

  Crush, Christian, Spiritual

  James Russell Lowell (2016). “Delphi Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Illustrated)”, p.316, Delphi Classics

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