#knave

Honest men are the soft easy cushions on which knaves repose and fatten. ↗

— Thomas Otway

#easy #fatten #honest #honest men #knaves

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. ↗

— Ovid

#cunning #difference #knavery #leads #lying

No man is so much a fool as not to have wit enough sometimes to be a knave; nor any so cunning a knave as not to have the weakness sometimes to play the fool. ↗

— George Savile

#cunning #enough #fool #knave #man

Still, the car started, so we drove off to the movies. Popcorn happened. Previews, ads, and an annoying kid all went down like clockwork. The picture started and then ended a while later, the world unchanged by its passing. ↗

— Adam P. Knave

#horror #movies

The same ambition can destroy or save, and make a patriot as it makes a knave. ↗

— Alexander Pope

#destroy #knave #make #makes #patriot

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

— Ambrose Bierce

#about #account #brought #events #false

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

#both #conscience #deceived #fools #i

As happens in dreams, when a perfectly harmless object inspires us with fear and thereafter is frightening every time we dream of it (and even in real life retains disquieting overtones), so Dreyer's presence became for Franz a refined torture, an implacable menace. [ ... H]e could not help cringing when, with a banging of doors in a dramatic draft, Martha and Dreyer entered simultaneously from two different rooms as if on a too harshly lit stage. Then he snapped to attention and in this attitude felt himself ascending through the ceiling, through the roof, into the black-brown sky, while, in reality, drained and empty, he was shaking hands with Martha, with Dreyer. He dropped back on his feet out of that dark nonexistence, from those unknown and rather silly heights, to land firmly in the middle of the room (safe, safe!) when hearty Dreyer described a circle with his index finger and jabbed him in the navel; Franz mimicked a gasp and giggled; and as usual Martha was coldly radiant. His fear did not pass but only subsided temporarily: one incautious glance, one eloquent smile, and all would be revealed, and a disaster beyond imagination would shatter his career. Thereafter whenever he entered this house, he imagined that the disaster had happened—that Martha had been found out, or had confessed everything in a fit of insanity or religious self-immolation to her husband; and the drawing room chandelier invariably met him with a sinister refulgence. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#knave #queen #attitude

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. ↗

— Philip Stanhope

#certain degree #degree #fear #fools #great

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. ↗

— George III

#end #evil #feature #in the end #inhabitants