"Knavery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will eat it up. The members of this House are the maggots of the Constitution. They are the locusts that devour it and cause all the evils that are complained of. There is nothing wicked which does not emanate from this House. In it originate all knavery, perjury, and fraud. You well know all this. You also know that the means by which the great majority of the House is returned is one great cause of the corruption of the whole people. It has been said, 'Let the people reform themselves;' ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... he cried in a tempest of wrath. "A murrain upon his greedy, crafty lust! The gods blast him in his knavery! Now is my precious amulet in his hands. Would it were white-hot and clung to him ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... easily as he had anticipated, he had determined to desert his men, and fly to the East Indies, or stay behind in Newfoundland. The King was supposed to have, with his wonted and infallible sagacity, made the discovery of Ralegh's knavery long since. That royal hypothesis of stark imposture, and no enthusiasm, was the clue which the Lords Commissioners, with Bacon at their head, had obsequiously borrowed to hale Ralegh to the scaffold. It was the strange sophism out of which Bacon again ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... was the costumer of the immense drama which knavery plays in Paris. His lair was the green-room whence theft emerged, and into which roguery retreated. A tattered knave arrived at this dressing-room, deposited his thirty sous and selected, according to the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Guy continued, "to shake off that past, reeking with loathsome and dishonorable crimes, but he brought his knavery within these respectable walls—he dared to pay his attentions to your ward, and speak words of forbidden love into her ears, while the crime of having enticed as young and respectable a girl from her comfortable home, to swindle her out of ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... and he should have perfect remedy. He did so, Aristagoras shaved him with his own hands, read his friend's letter, and when he had done, washed it out, that no man should perceive it else, and sent him home to buy him a nightcap. If I wist there were any such knavery, or Peter Bales's brachygraphy,[58] under Sol's bushy hair, I would have a barber, my host of the Murrion's Head, to be his interpreter, who would whet his razor on his Richmond cap, and give him the terrible cut like himself, but he would come as near as a quart pot to the construction ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... my grave, that I suffered a chain of accidents to draw me into such measures and such company; that I have been obliged to defend myself against such accusations and such accusers; that by associating with so much folly and so much knavery I am become the victim of both; that I was distressed by the former, when the latter would have been less grievous to me, since it is much better in business to be yoked to knaves than fools; and that I put into their ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... looked in them, than indeed said anything to them; but we will pass them and proceed. You have heard of the sins of his youth, of his apprenticeship, and how he set up, and married, and what a life he hath led his wife; and now I will tell you some more of his pranks. He had the very knack for knavery; had he, as I said before, been bound to serve an apprenticeship to all these things, he could not have been more cunning, he could not have been ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... cotton boll o'er fields of Carolina, And fills with snowy flosses the dusky hands of Dinah; Till war has dealt its final blow, and Mr. Seward's knavery Has put an end in all the land to freedom and ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... abominations, but supplying him with those missing pieces of the puzzle for which he had long and vainly searched. During the brief colloquy between Galloway and the innkeeper his brain had been busy fitting together the whole intricate design of knavery. ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... on the point of exposing this cheap bit of knavery when the young man glanced in his direction. Something in the steady gaze of the gray eyes, though for the life of him he could not have told what, stayed his purpose, and he settled into his seat, ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... Graney looked gravely at Trevison. "There's knavery here, my boy; there's some sort of influence behind Lindman. Let's see some of the other owners who are ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... great master of laughter and of tears. His serious poetry is full of the tenderest pathos. His loosest tales are delightfully humorous and life-like. He is the kindliest of satirists. The knavery, greed, and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and Wiclif, though his mood is not like theirs, one of stern, moral indignation, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... from it that they prefer to run in danger of their life every day than to stop getting unlawful gain from you. 21. If they beseech you and entreat you, you should not justly pity them, but rather have compassion on the citizens who have been dying with hunger on account of their knavery, and the merchants against whom they combined. These you will please and make more zealous if you inflict punishment on the dealers. But if not, what opinion do you think they will have when they learn that you let off the retail dealers who themselves ...
— The Orations of Lysias • Lysias
... putting the most valuable effects on one cart, which they appropriate to themselves, and drive away with it to some distance out of sight, paying the driver out of their own pockets: "No doubt whatever exists as to the knavery of Montbrion and Bergier; administrators and commissioners of the administration of the department."—De Sades, the author of "Justine," pleads his well-known civism and the ultra-revolutionary petitions drawn up by him in the name of the section ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... stock issues. But the railroad corporation was a stock corporation; whoever secured control of a majority of the stock became the legal administrator of its policies and property. By adroit manipulation, intimidation, superior knavery, and the corrupt domination of law, it was always easy for those who understood the science of rigging the stock market, and that of strategic undermining, to wrest the control away from weak, or (treating the word in a commercial sense) incompetent, holders. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... has run up and down mine Country and learn many fine thing, and mush knavery, now more and all dis me know you'll jumbla de fine vench and fill her belly with garsoone, her name ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... all the qualities to fit him for one—indeed, he is only too prudent, modest, humble, chaste, and peaceable!" Still, admirable as these characteristics are, he is not quite the nag one expected. "I fancy that through some knavery or blundering on your servant's part, I must have got a different steed from the one you intended for me. In fact, now I come to remember, I had bidden my servant not to accept a horse except it were a good one; but I am infinitely obliged to you all the same." Even Warham's temper must have ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... examples of this species of knavery. One, in which a reproduction of the scarce portrait of Milton usually attached to the first edition of his 'Poems,' 1645, had been actually split and laid down on old paper to make it resemble the original print: the other, a case in which a copy of Lovelace's 'Lucasta,' 1649, lacked ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... spirits animating the Diggers and their opponents, by relating how one of the Colonels of the Army told him—"That the Diggers did work upon Georges Hill for no other end than to draw a company of people into arms; and that our knavery was found out, because it takes not that effect": on ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... the world. But the neglected infant has wilted into the premature man, with his old cunning look, blending so fantastically, so mournfully, with the unformed features of youth. Knowing the world on its worst side—knowing its hostility, its knavery, its foulness, its heartless materialism—knowing it as the man does not know it who has only breathed the country air, and looked upon the open face of nature. Is it not very sad, my friends, that the vagrant boy should know so much; and, without one hour of romance, one step ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... The man was a sanctimonious Chadband. He had come with nefarious designs on Judith's slender capital. I saw knavery in the whites ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Character. Canadian Society. Official Festivities. A Party of Pleasure. Hospitalities of Bigot. Desperate Gambling. Chateau Bigot. Canadian Ladies. Cadet. La Friponne. Official Rascality. Methods of Peculation. Cruel Frauds on the Acadians. Military Corruption. Pean. Love and Knavery. Varin and his Partners. Vaudreuil and the Peculators. He defends Bigot; praises Cadet and Pean. Canadian Finances. Peril of Bigot. Threats of the Minister. Evidence of Montcalm. Impending ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... supply, water excepted, which could sustain them through its horrors, (and which yet, through that single want, had nearly perished)—they persued a long and dlifficult march through a dreary country, scantily peopled, dotted with robber clans, and exhibiting impediments of all kinds in the knavery and villany of the native authorities; until they reached the borders of Abyssinia. We had by no means been aware that volcanoes had made so large a share of this portion of Africa. The whole border seems to be volcanic, and to retain in its blasted and broken surface, evidence of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... called a Simonist and eke a Courtisan, And here to every peasant and every common man My knavery will very well appear. I called and cried to all who'd give me ear, To nobleman and knight and all above me: "Behold me! And ye'll find ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... carried away, as having my permission for so doing; which yet I did not grant him voluntarily, but only out of fear of the multitude, since, if I had forbidden him, I should have been stoned by them. When I had therefore permitted this to be done by John, he gained vast sums of money by this his knavery. ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... other joint-stock companies for foreign trade are subject; but they had an immense capital divided among an immense number of proprietors. It was naturally to be expected, therefore, that folly, negligence, and profusion, should prevail in the whole management of their affairs. The knavery and extravagance of their stock-jobbing projects are sufficiently known, and the explication of them would be foreign to the present subject. Their mercantile projects were not much better conducted. The first trade which they engaged in, was that of supplying the Spanish ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... by narrow-minded good men were supplemented by the knavery of unscrupulous bad men. The Indian trader, in accordance with the teachings of the times, not only looked upon the savages as the offspring of Satan, but also as fair objects of spoil; consequently, the simplicity, moral honesty, and ignorance ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... and familiarity of many who had been my acquaintance in my prosperity, but had denied and shunned me in my adversity, and now very forwardly renewed their acquaintance with me. In short, I had sufficiently seen that the pleasures of the world are chiefly folly, and the business of it mostly knavery, and both nothing better than vanity; the men of pleasure tearing one another to pieces from the emulation of spending money, and the men of business from envy in getting it. My happiness consisted entirely in my ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... not imagining that a person so rich as an Englishman MUST be, would go out in a cold night for the sake of obtaining a reasonable bargain. They were, however, much mistaken, as I told them that rather than encourage them in their knavery, I should be content to return to Lisbon; whereupon they dropped their demand to three and a half, but I made them no answer, and going out with Antonio, proceeded to the house of the old man who had accompanied us to Evora. We knocked a considerable time, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... sauces; then he inveighed against the infamous practices of French publicans, attributing such imposition to their oppressive government, which kept them so necessitous, that they were tempted to exercise all manner of knavery upon their unwary guests. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... after the expiration of the term agreed on, he demands the sum: I ask, What reason or motive have I to restore the money? It will, perhaps, be said, that my regard to justice, and abhorrence of villainy and knavery, are sufficient reasons for me, if I have the least grain of honesty, or sense of duty and obligation. And this answer, no doubt, is just and satisfactory to man in his civilized state, and when trained up ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... and better prospects than the present, but nothing ever corresponded less than their performances with their pretensions. The composition of the Government was radically defective, and with a good deal of loose talent there was so much of passion, folly, violence, and knavery, together with inexperience and ignorance mixed up with it, that from the very beginning they cut the sorriest possible figure. Such men as Richmond, Durham, Althorp, and Graham, in their different ways, were enough to spoil any Cabinet, and consequently their course has ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... credit be still the same, and upon a bottom that can never be shaken; and though all interest be duly paid by the public, yet through the contrivance and cunning of stock-jobbers, there has been brought in such a complication of knavery and cozenage, such a mystery of iniquity, and such an unintelligible jargon of terms to involve it in, as were never known in any other age or country of the world. I have heard it affirmed by persons skilled in these calculations, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... the curiosity of our friend Mrs. Grundy—that is,'the World'—without injury to any one. We must suppose that that footman of Trevanion's was out of his mind,—it is but a charitable, and your good father would say a philosophical, supposition. All great knavery is madness! The world could not get on if truth and goodness were not the natural tendencies of sane minds. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from the credulity of his neighbors. "The spirits," then at the height of their profit and renown, were adapted to his purpose. A blank and vacant mind was freely offered to any power of earth or air which would condescend to enter and possess it. And so Mr. Stellato, with his three parts knavery and two parts delusion, became a popular and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... rascals; I should never have believed that such were living in the world. If one did not know them, one would think them the nicest men the earth could show. For my own part I cannot help laughing at them whenever they talk to me. They know that their knavery is no secret but ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... excited my curiosity to detect the first modern who obtruded such formless things on public attention. I conjectured that, whoever he might be, he would be distinguished for his egotism and his knavery. My hypothetical criticism turned out to be correct. Nothing less than the audacity of the unblushing Pietro Aretino could have adventured on this project; he claims the honour, and the critics do not deny it, of being the first who published Italian letters. Aretino ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... did inform myself well in things relating to the East Indys; both of the country, and the disappointment the King met with the last voyage, by the knavery of the Portugall Viceroy, and the inconsiderableness of the place of Bombaim, [Bombay.] if we had had it. But, above all things, it seems strange to me that matters should not be understood before they ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... tell you news from court; Marke, these things will make you good sport. All the French that lately did prance There, up and downe in bravery, Now are all sent back to France, King Charles hath smelt some knavery. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... fortunes made in the United States are (as Henry George has shown in his "Social Problems") the result of knavery on a large scale, assisted by the State. In Europe, nine-tenths of the fortunes made in our monarchies and republics have the same origin. There are not two ways ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... the scale 'where the pure gold is, easily turns the balance.' In the words of Angellier: 'Admiration grows in proportion as we examine his qualities. When we think of his sincerity, of his rectitude, of his kindness towards man and beast; of his scorn of all that is base, his hatred of all knavery which in itself would be an honour; of his disinterestedness, of the fine impulses of his heart, and the high aspirations of his spirit; of the intensity and idealism necessary to maintain his soul above its circumstances; when we reflect that he has expressed all ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... yourself, and leave these passions: Now do I sound the depth of all their drifts, The devil's[154] device and Churms his knavery; On whom this heart hath vow'd to be reveng'd. I'll scatter them: the plot's already in my head. Nurse, hie thee home, commend me to my sister; Bid her this night send for Master Churms: To him she must recount her many griefs, Exclaim against her father's ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... on salaries of from one to two thousand dollars per annum. Nor can this be prevented; for every new check is only a transfer of power from intelligent to ignorant hands; and ignorance, however honest, is a more expensive manager and easier victim than knavery. There is but one remedy. Make it for men's interest to reduce the expenses of operating to a minimum. Make it for their interest to do so, by allowing them to share in the profits, and then the question is solved, and you have a thousand vigilant guardians of your property ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... to lower, and some to brighten, many to ignore, a few to challenge or charm,—as we pass. And what lessons of fortune and of character are written thereon,—the blush of innocence and the hardihood of recklessness, the candid grace of honor and the mean deprecatory glance of knavery, intelligence and stupidity, soulfulness and vanity, the glad smile of friendship, the shrinking eye of fallen fortune, the dubious recognition of disgrace, the effrontery of the adventurer, and the calm, pleasant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... the king is a proof that I am a fool, the wise men are deserting him. There is knavery in this desertion, but there ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... to catch the man who did that. It was such planned rascality, such keen-witted scoundrelism, that it gives me a fierce desire to show him up. I'd like to teach the beggar that honesty can be as intelligent as knavery; that in spite of his strength of cunning, law and right are stronger. I wish I could catch him," and the brass poker gleamed in a savage flourish. "I'd have no mercy. The hungry wretch who steals meat, the ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... play Greene introduces a court-fool, and he mixes with the stupidity and knavery of his clowns, a sort of artificial philosophy and argumentative ingenuity, which savours much of the old jesters. In "James the Fourth" ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... tried to get the ex-teller "in bad" by sending the cheque so soon? It would, thought Nelson, be perfectly in harmony with the Banfield manager's knavery. Probably Henty had quit, suddenly; and, angered, Penton had sought revenge on Henty's old associate. However, there was no harm done, thought Evan; and he dismissed the matter from his mind—the ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... once he recommended to me an old woman of the name of Masha, who lived in a village a few miles off. Masha was what is known in Russia as a znakharka—that is to say, a woman who is half witch, half medical practitioner—the whole permeated with a strong leaven of knavery. According to Anton, she could effect by means of herbs and charms every possible cure short of raising from the dead, and even with regard to this last operation he cautiously refrained ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... paint all he wanted, as he wanted. He allows Steno to love him because she is diabolically pretty, notwithstanding her forty years, and then she is, in spite of all, a real noblewoman, which flattered him. He has not one dollar's-worth of moral delicacy in his heart. But he has an abundance of knavery.... Let us, too, strike out his wife. She is such a veritable slave whom the mere presence of a white person annihilates to such a degree that she dares not look her husband in the face.... It is not Hafner. The sly fox is capable of doing ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... wit to cozen; confederacy and dishonesty will doo't without wit. Ile iustifie it: do not you know the receit of Cozenage? take an ounce of knavery at the least,—and confederacie is but so many knaves put together,—then you must take a very fine young Codling heire and pound him as small as ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... calculation a virtue, or virtue calculation? You won't say? Well, we won't quarrel over that, since we have Bonald to refer to. We are, and intend to remain, virtuous; nevertheless at this moment I believe that you, with all your pretty little knavery, are a better woman ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... greed of triumph, a Roman cannot keep honor pure. In the games—all of them, mark you—their tricks are infinite; in chariot racing their knavery extends to everything—from horse to driver, from driver to master. Wherefore, good sheik, look well to all thou hast; from this till the trial is over, let no stranger so much as see the horses. Would you be perfectly safe, do more—keep watch over ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... think it will prove otherwise," said the lawyer. "This woman has played a part till she believes it; or, if she be a thorough-paced impostor, without a single grain of self-delusion to qualify her knavery, still she may think herself bound to act in character-this I know, that I could get nothing out of her by the common modes of interrogation, and the wisest thing we can do is to give her an opportunity of making the discovery her own way. And now have you more ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... others, embracing, as it does, all in turn, that it has come to be considered the type of roguery in general; and now, just as all the political squibs were made to come of old from the lips of Pasquin, all the reflections on the prevailing cant, knavery, quackery, humbug, are put into the mouth of ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... more, to comply with the ruling taste, lest he should lose the publick favour by pictures more delicate and less striking; that, in a state, where it was considered as policy to lay open every thing that had the appearance of ambition, singularity, or knavery, comedy was become a haranguer, a reformer, and a publick counsellor, from whom the people learned to take care of their most valuable interests; and that this comedy, in the attempt to lead, and to please the people, claimed a right to the strongest touches of eloquence, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... must be without a Saviour. He comes to the man of business, and shows him visions of vast wealth. He whispers, "All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me." And that implies false dealing, sharp practice, trickery, knavery. It implies loss of self-respect, loss of honour, the reproaches of an ever-accusing conscience. The tempter comes to the young man or woman, and shows them all the delights of a life of pleasure. They see the sparkle of the wine cup, the glitter of the ball room, the pomp and vanities ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... was evidently not acquainted with even the rudiments of knavery. I wanted to get up and instruct him in them. I felt that there were little subtleties of rascaldom, little touches of criminality, that I could have put that man up to, which would have transformed his Judas from ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... lucky Moment of buying as he intended at the Rise of the South-Sea. Another complains of the Roguery of some Broker or Director, whom he intrusted; this I have heard canvass'd over and over, with so many Aggravations of Meanness and Knavery against each other, that, I confess, I shall never see a poor Malefactor go to suffer Death for robbing another of ten Pounds upon the High-Way, but I shall look with Compassion on his Condition, and perhaps reflect secretly upon the Partiality of publick Justice. I know so many ...
— The Theater (1720) • Sir John Falstaffe
... mean? I must go to Lebadea, swaddle myself up in absurd linen, take a cake in my hand, and crawl through a narrow passage into a cave, before I could tell that you are a dead man, with nothing but knavery to differentiate you from the rest of us? Now, on your seer-ship, what is a Hero? I am ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... up and downe mane Countrie and learne many fine ting and mush knavery; now more and all dis me know you ha jumbla de fine vench and fill her belly wid a Garsoone: ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... country. Thus he built up a tidy fortune with other people's money, became as round as a butt, larded with fat, and was called Monsieur. At the time of the last fair three young fellows, who were apprentices in knavery, in whom there was more of the material that makes thieves than saints, and who knew just how far it was possible to go without catching their necks in the branches of trees, made up their minds to amuse themselves, and live well, condemning certain ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... would have killed him, if the noise had not been heard upon deck by the conspirators, some of whom ran down and overpowered him. While this was done, two of the sick men, Lodlo and Bute, boldly reproached their shipmates for their wickedness, telling them, that their knavery would show itself, and that their actions were prompted by mere vengeance, not the wish to preserve their lives. But their words had ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... his arms, laying one clenched fist quietly on the table. "I'll tell you why. Because you drummed nothing but money and knavery into their ears from the time they wore knickerbockers; because you carped away at them as you've been carping here tonight, holding our friends Phelps and Elder up to them for their models, as our grandfathers held up George Washington and John Adams. But the boys were young, ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... four generations the vigorous hungry blood of the Duvillards, after producing three magnificent beasts of prey, had, as if exhausted by the contentment of every passion, ended in this sorry emasculated creature, who was incapable alike of great knavery ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... human happiness, Alas! for human sorrow; Our Yesterday is nothingness, What else will be our Morrow? Still Beauty must be stealing hearts, And Knavery stealing purses; Still Cooks must live by making tarts, And Wits by making verses; While Sages prate and Courts debate, The same Stars set and shine; And the World, as it roll'd through ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... something very fantastical in the distribution of civil power and capacity among men. The law certainly gives these persons into the ward and care of the Crown, because that is best able to protect them from injuries, and the impositions of craft and knavery; that the life of an idiot may not ruin the entail of a noble house, and his weakness may not frustrate the industry or capacity of the founder of his family. But when one of bright parts, as we say, with his eyes open, and all men's eyes upon him, destroys those purposes, ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... for their subsistance, and feed upon leaves and young shoots of trees. Many projects, such as belts, hobles, &c., were tried, but none of these were a security against the wildness of the country and the knavery of the people we were obliged to employ: by these means we lost our horses almost as fast as we could collect them, and those which remained grew very weak, so we found ourselves every day less able to undertake the extra-ordinary march we ...
— Conestoga Wagons in Braddock's Campaign, 1755 • Don H. Berkebile
... many years he had been keeping the tavern, and no one either of the peasants or of the gentry had ever made complaint against him to his landlord. Of what should they complain? He had good drinks to choose from; he kept his accounts strictly, but without any knavery; he did not forbid merriment, but would not endure drunkenness. He was a great lover of entertainments; at his tavern marriages and christenings were celebrated; every Sunday he had musicians come from the village, including a bass ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... Might in ever a fight, And Truth is Bravery, And the Right and True are the Ready too, When the bolt is hurl'd in the peaceful blue By the hand of Knavery. And the Land that fears for its Volunteers Is ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... to have been dictated in all the distraction of a proud woman who sees her vengeance baffled, as well as her love disdained. Her letter was nothing but a succession of reproaches, menaces, and incoherent execrations. She taxed him with knavery, insensibility, and dissimulation; imprecated a thousand curses upon his head, and threatened not only to persecute his life with all the arts that hell and malice could inspire, but also to wound him in the person of her daughter-in-law, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... with imbecility and confusion, while at the same time there was such an uncontending frankness in his countenance, that a superficial observer would have supposed he must have been the prey of the first plausible knavery that was practised against him. Great reason have I to remember him with affection! He was the most ardent, I had almost said the last, of my friends. Nor did I remain in this respect in his debt. There was indeed a great congeniality, if I may presume to say so, in our characters, except that ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... abuse the publisher, Vlac, who had officially signed his name to Morus's preface. The mixture of fanatical choler and grotesque jocularity, in which he rolls forth his charges of incontinence against Morus, and of petty knavery against Vlac, is only saved from being unseemly by being ridiculous. The comedy is complete when we remember that Morus had not written the Clamor, nor Vlac the preface. Milton's rage blinded him; he is mad Ajax castigating innocent sheep instead ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... poke out a speech in favor of the constitutionality of appropriations for the improvement of Western rivers and harbors. The debate was continued between the conflicting absurdities of the Southern Democracy, which is slavery, and the Western Democracy, which is knavery." Under the leadership of Jackson and other Southerners, the Democrats, notwithstanding their long ascendency, had adhered to their position on internal improvements more consistently, perhaps, than to any other of the contentions ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... quality or their merits; whereas in England it is just the reverse of all this. Here you may securely display your utmost rhetoric against mankind in the face of the world; tell them that all are gone astray; that there is none that doeth good, no, not one; that we live in the very dregs of time; that knavery and atheism are epidemic as the pox; that honesty is fled with Astraea; with any other common-places equally new and eloquent, which are furnished by the splendida bills {56c}; and when you have done, the whole audience, far from being offended, shall return ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... such army gathering: ours the spur, No scattered foe to face, but Lucifer. Not fool or knave is now the enemy O'ershadowing men, 'tis Folly, Knavery! A sea; nor stays that sea the bastioned beach. Now must the brother soul alive in each, His traitorous individual devildom Hold subject lest the grand destruction come. Dimly men see it menacing apace To overthrow, perchance uproot the race. Within, without, they are a field ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... nothing, but—but one of the school-windows was without a snib, and next morning when the dominie reached his desk he was surprised to find on it a little cotton glove. He raised it on high, greatly puzzled, and then, as ever when he suspected knavery, his eyes sought Tommy, who was sitting on a form, his arms proudly folded. That the whelp had put the glove there, Cathro no longer doubted, and he would have liked to know why, but was reluctant to give him the satisfaction of asking. So the gauntlet—for gauntlet it ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... for funds, and he insisted upon making the Adams administration odious. In referring to the President and his secretary of state, he did not personally join in the cry of bargain and sale, of fraud and corruption, of treachery and knavery; nor did he speak of them as "the Puritan and the Blackleg;" but for three years his criticisms had so associated the Administration with Federalism and the offensive alien and sedition laws which Jefferson condemned and defeated in 1800, that the younger Adams inherited ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... oar is a miserable spectacle, and the noise of their chains with the roaring of the beaten waters has something of the strange and fearful to one unaccustomed to it. They are chastised on the least disorder, and without the least humanity; yet are they cheerful and full of knavery. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... of more doubloons in his money-bags I think that La Chesnaye's servile nature would have bargained to send souls in job lots blindfold over the gangplank. But, as La Chesnaye said when Pierre Radisson remonstrated against the knavery, the gin was ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... to be brothers," said he, with the grin of one too well accustomed to knavery to trust any thing opposed to his own observation. "I suppose them's things happens in Canada as elsewhere," said he, laughing, and hoping the jest might turn her flank. Meanwhile the press-leader never took his eyes off me, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... these phenomena] is one to be discussed on its merits, in order to arrive at a distinct opinion how far it may be connected with facts insufficiently appreciated and explained by science, and how far with superstition, delusion, and sheer knavery. Such investigation, pursued by careful observation in a scientific spirit, would seem apt to throw light on ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... now, Herr Schmick," I made haste to exclaim, seeing lachrymose symptoms in his blear old eyes. Then I became firm once more. This knavery must cease, or I'd know the reason why. "The next man who comes here to cart away so much as a single piece is to be kicked out. Do you understand? These things belong to me. Kick him into the river. Or, better still, notify me and I'll do it. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... flung the earth up again so as to conceal it completely, then pointing significantly at the other workmen, he nodded, shrugged, gesticulated, and held out both his paws for a recompense, which I gave him willingly; at the same time laughing and shaking my head to show I understood his knavery. I rewarded him apparently beyond his hopes, for he followed me down the street, bowing, grinning, and cutting ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin, poor soul, was in great feather: he had done a good stroke of knavery that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald head shone rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant stomach shook with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were only roadside bargains and a hands-breadth of writing on the purchase of a hundred pound farm, and a cairn or an Arthur's quoit {49b} raised as a memorial of the purchase and boundaries. People have not the courage to do so nowadays, but more cunning, knavery, and written parchment, wide as a cromlech, is necessary to bind the bargain, and for all that it would be strange if no flaw existed or were contrived therein." "Well, well," said Taliesin, "I would not be worth a straw ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... about,' as you call it, that he will find no occasions of doing any good—the ill company will sooner corrupt him than be the better for him; or if, notwithstanding all their ill company, he still remains steady and innocent, yet their follies and knavery will be imputed to him; and, by mixing counsels with them, he must bear his share of all the blame ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... and extortion. Every article of house-keeping is raised to an enormous price; a circumstance no longer to be wondered at, when we know that every petty retainer of fortune piques himself upon keeping a table, and thinks it is for the honour of his character to wink at the knavery of his servants, who are in a confederacy with the market-people; and, of consequence, pay whatever they demand. Here is now a mushroom of opulence, who pays a cook seventy guineas a week for furnishing him with one meal a day. This portentous frenzy is become ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... fell,—a jerk, a strain! The sheriff's fled asunder; The faking-boy ne'er spoke again, For they pulled his legs from under. And there he dangles on the tree, That sort of love and bravery! Oh, that such men should victims be Of law, and law's vile knavery. ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... interpreted these words to the others, Jost Tetzel, Ursula's father, declared them to be sheer lies and knavery; even Uncle Conrad deemed them of little worth; and for this reason: that if the lad had indeed been the son of some grand Emir of Egypt the bear-leader would for certain have made profit of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... It is the same for policemen—those 'Finders out of Occasions,' as Othello styles them—those 'rough and ready' to choke ideas, as the bud is bit by the venomous worm 'ere it can spread its sweet leaves to the air.' I was about to encounter the assailing eyes of knavery. A gentleman of the administration welcomed me in. 'Sir,' I said, coldly, 'I was invited to meet the prefect of the police. I wish to know what is deemed an outrage to the ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... harangued upon the knavery of a publican in Canterbury, who had charged the French ambassador forty pounds for a supper that was not worth forty shillings. They talked much of honesty and conscience; but when they produced their ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... benevolent amusement of Mr. Austin and Colonel Halkett, he charged the responsibility of every crime committed in the country, and every condition of misery, upon the party which declined to move in advance, and which therefore apologized for the perpetuation of knavery, villany, brutality, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... never so indirect; they cannot see so far as to the remote Consequences of a steady Integrity, and the vast Benefit and Advantages which it will bring a Man at last. Were but this sort of Men wise and clear-sighted enough to discern this, they would be honest out of very Knavery, not out of any Love to Honesty and Virtue, but with a crafty Design to promote and advance more effectually their own Interests; and therefore the Justice of the Divine Providence hath hid this truest Point of Wisdom from their Eyes, that bad Men might not ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... well, that he will dine or sup with them; any one of a dozen railroad-trains may, for aught he knows, be sweeping him away to some remote point, to battle with the mischances of trade, the misfortunes of honest men, or the knavery of rogues and the meshes of the law. Once in the cars, he casts his eye around in uneasy expectation of finding some one or more of his neighbors bound on the same errand. While yet peering over the seats in front of him, he ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... the cause of his grief, plunged into the stream and brought up a golden axe, inquiring if he had lost it. The Workman seized it greedily, and declared that truly it was the very same axe that he had lost. Mercury, displeased at his knavery, not only took away the golden axe, but refused to recover for him the axe he had ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... Giles it was gotten into several streets, and several families lay all sick together; and, accordingly, in the weekly bill for the next week the thing began to show itself. There was indeed but fourteen set down of the plague, but this was all knavery and collusion, for in St Giles's parish they buried forty in all, whereof it was certain most of them died of the plague, though they were set down of other distempers; and though the number of all the burials were not increased above ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... worse gentleman for that neither," said Dame Ursley, in the same tone; "let a man bear his folly gaily and his knavery stoutly, and let me see if gravity or honesty will look him in the face now-a- days. Tut, man, it was only in the time of King Arthur or King Lud, that a gentleman was held to blemish his scutcheon by a leap over the line of reason or honesty—It is the bold look, the ready hand, the fine ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... breakfasted with them this morning in their actual drawing-rooms, or should meet them this afternoon in the Park! What a genius! what a vigour! what a bright-eyed intelligence and observation! what a wholesome hatred for meanness and knavery! what a vast sympathy! what a cheerfulness! what a manly relish of life! what a love of human kind! what a poet is here!—watching, meditating, brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths has that man left behind him! What generations he has taught to laugh wisely ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... conceptions and novelties; Wherein also the lewde, unchristian practises of Witchmongers, upon aged, melancholy, ignorant and superstitious people in extorting confessions by inhumane terrors and Tortures, is notably detected. Also The knavery and confederacy of Conjurors. The impious blasphemy of Inchanters. The imposture of Soothsayers, and infidelity of Atheists. The delusion of Pythonists, Figure-casters, Astrologers, and vanity of Dreamers. The fruitlesse beggarly art of Alchimistry. The horrible art of Poisoning ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... 'sale-speakers' exercise no other trade. They go from market to market, to promote business, as they say. They have generally a great knowledge of cattle, have much fluency of tongue, and are, above all, endowed with a knavery beyond all shame. They dispute by turns furiously and argumentatively as to the merits and defects of the animal, but as soon as it comes to be a question of price, the tongue is laid aside as a medium, and the conversation proceeds altogether ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... "not as men looked at it then. There was a great deal of downright knavery in business, but there was another class who satisfied their consciences by being as honest as they could. The thoughtful ones knew the system was wrong but felt themselves utterly unable to replace it by a better ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... but was not yet a Quackery and Falsehood, was a thing as true as it could manage to be! That really may be the fact of this too. In any case what signifies it much? Money were still useful; but it is not now so indispensable. Booksellers by their knavery or their fidelity cannot kill us or cure us. Of the truth of Waldo Emerson's heart to me, there is, God be thanked for it, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... not weigh so much with Florence, but Dodger was more practical, and he wished to restore her to the social position which she had lost through the knavery of ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... spendthrift,—clothes distained, ill-assorted, yet, still of fine cloth; shoes in holes, yet still pearl-coloured brodequins. But now it is the decay of no foppish spendthrift: the rags are not of fine cloth; the tattered shoes are not the brodequins. The man has fallen far below the politer grades of knavery, in which the sharper affects the beau. And the countenance, as we last saw it, if it had lost much of its earlier beauty, was still incontestably handsome. What with vigour and health and animal spirits, then on the aspect ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c. This I daily hear, and such like, both private and public news, amidst the gallantry and misery of the world; jollity, pride, perplexities and cares, simplicity and villainy; subtlety, knavery, candour and integrity, mutually mixed and offering themselves; I rub on privus privatus; as I have still lived, so I now continue, statu quo prius, left to a solitary life, and mine own domestic discontents: saving that sometimes, ne quid mentiar, as Diogenes went into ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... fellows had lived and rioted like fools for months, and months, and months, but a short distance from all these vast hoards of gold. This knowledge almost maddened him as he brooded over it by night and by day. When he had been set free from the French prison to which his knavery had consigned him, Banker gave himself up body and soul to the consideration of the treasure which Captain Horn had brought to France from Peru. He considered it from every possible point of view, and when at last he heard of the final disposition which it had been ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... cheat me out of every dollar that I put into his hands. It would take just about as much evidence to prove that young crows would be black when their feathers are grown, as it would to satisfy the community that these statements are true, especially where he is known. For knavery, untruthfulness, and wickedness, I have never seen anything, in all my business experience of forty years, that will compare with this. He would not have taken such a course with me once, but he took advantage of my age and misfortunes to commit these frauds, thinking that I could ...
— History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome
... Grant it that one of your political measures is rank imbecility, your acts in exposing the essential knavery of our phenomenal humbugs are beautiful and full of goodness and wisdom. And your worst, in the face of all jibes, is so incomparably superior to those of the "great statesmen" that they may be esteemed ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... master hand we watch with bated breath the unfolding of a story of unparalleled interest. Ever the unexpected happens, surprise follows surprise, plot is succeeded by counterplot. Vice and virtue, honor and knavery, true love and duplicity, struggle desperately and incessantly for mastery until the mind is bewildered and the heart and soul are stirred to their ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... court with falsehood's blackness, And stained by the yoke of slavery, Full of godless flattery, of vicious lying, And ev'ry possible knavery. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... in Cincinnati; the time, one week ago to-night; the occasion, the playing of a game of cards between young Beresford and yourself in which you were the winner—by what knavery you best know—the stakes so heavy that, on perceiving that he had lost, the young man cried out that he was ruined, and in his mad despair attempted self-destruction. It is quite possible that you may not have ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... There's one went for the Friar an hour ago. Comes he not yet? s'foot, if I do find knavery unders cowl, I'll tickle him, I'll firk him. Here, here, he's here, he's here. Good morrow, Friar; good morrow, ...
— The Merry Devil • William Shakespeare
... chivalrous adventurer in red armor was disgusted. "Oh, you tall squinting villain knight of the silver stallion, I wonder from whose court you can be coming, where they teach no better behavior than woman-killing, and I wonder what foul new knavery you can ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... It confirms what I have said of the Knavery of the Devil in his Dealings, and that when he has Stock-jobb'd with us on the best Conditions he can get, he ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... week. This indolence increases their propensity to stealing and cheating. They seek to avail themselves of every opportunity to satisfy their lawless desires. Their universal bad character, therefore, for fickleness, infidelity, ingratitude, revenge, malice, rage, depravity, laziness, knavery, thievishness, and cunning, though not deficient in capacity and cleverness, renders them people of no use in society. The boys will run like wild things after carrion, let it stink ever so much, and where a mortality happens among the cattle, there these wretched creatures are to ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... rebellious Provinces, perhaps something might be done with them; but, on the whole, he was inclined to think that they had been influenced by knavish and deceitful motives from the beginning. He enjoined it upon Parma, therefore, to proceed with equal knavery—taking care, however, not to injure his reputation—and to enter into negotiations wherever occasion might serve, in order to put the English off their guard and to keep back the reinforcements so imperatively ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Glutton, as in most large ships, we had a number of bad characters—runaway apprentices, lawyers' clerks, broken-down tradesmen, footmen dismissed for knavery, play-actors, tinkers, gipsies, pickpockets, thieves of all sorts; indeed, the magistrates on shore seemed to think nothing was too bad to send on board a man-of-war. These men were, of course, always ready for mischief of any sort. There is no denying it, the seamen also were often ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... she held would further raise him in her estimation; but he had no desire to acquire her regard in that fashion. He would have preferred to take the chances of a rifle-shot, for while he had few scruples he had been born with a pride which, occasionally at least, prevented his indulgence in petty knavery; and, crushing down his anger, he set himself to consider by what means ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... inform his brother of the success of his treachery. This was the old Beschadeddin, our acquaintance, who, though he pretended to be a Mussulman, had always remained an Infidel. It was he who had excited his brother to all this knavery, in order that he himself might if possible gain possession of Smaragdine. He now took his people with him, provided himself with gold, mounted his mule, and repaired directly to Alischar's habitation. His slaves seized Smaragdine by force, threatening ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... adopt. Observe this first:—He means by a man who is "silly" not a man who is to be pitied, but a man who is to be abhorred. He means a man who is not simply weak and incapable, but a moral leper; a man who, if not a knave, has everything bad about him except knavery; nay, rather, has together with every other worst vice, a spice of knavery to boot. His simpleton is one who has become such, in judgment for his having once been a knave. His simpleton is not a born fool, but a self-made idiot, one who has drugged and abused himself into a shameless ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... ass back to the Jew, who said to him, "Wherefore hast thou brought him back?" and he replied, "He did a foul thing with my wife." So the Jew gave him his money again and he went away; and Azariah said to Ali, "Hast thou recourse to knavery, unlucky wretch that thou art, in order that"—And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... and dizard [fool] of a Northumberland," cried Dr Thorpe in great indignation. "I would the whole Dudley race had never been born! Knavery runs in their ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... corner, and passage, of the law's labyrinth. At length the measure is filled up, and the malignant power of debt is known. It has opened in the heart every fountain of iniquity; it has besoiled the conscience; it has tarnished the honor; it has made the man a deliberate student of knavery; a systematic practitioner of fraud; it has dragged him through all the sewers of petty passions,—anger, hate, revenge, malicious folly, or malignant shame. When a debtor is beaten at every point, and the law will put her screws upon him, there is no depth in ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... platoon of agricultural recruits? The officer who suffers such gladly has his name inscribed on the Golden Legend (unfortunately unpublished) of the British Army—"but when it comes," he went on, "to low-down lying knavery, then I'm done. I don't know how to tackle it. All I can do is to get out of the knave's way. I've found Gedge to be a beast, and I'm very honourably in love with Gedge's daughter, and I've asked her to marry me. I attach some value, Major, to your opinion of me, and I want you, to know ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... but draw forth a man's natural qualities; and to make them drink would only be to whet their Knavery. ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan |
