The same ambition can destroy or save, and make a patriot as it makes a knave.
It is a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave.
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.
My first lead role was a stage play called 'A Kestrel for a Knave'. I was 11.
Necessity makes an honest man a knave.