Rakes are more suspicious than honest men.

Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty; for faithful servants are always servants, and honest men are always poor; nor do any ever escape from servitude but the bold and faithless, or from poverty, but the rapacious and fraudulent.

He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.

A man who lies, thinking it is the truth, is an honest man, and a man who tells the truth, believing it to be a lie, is a liar.

Time is the only test of honest men, one day is space enough to know a rogue.

Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.

This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle – among others – that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error.

There’s one way to find out if a man is honest – ask him. If he says, ‘Yes,’ you know he is a crook.

Throughout American history, we have elected presidents who had not been honest man. Warren Harding, Richard Nixon, to some extent, Lyndon Johnson just to name a few.

I have always deeply desired to be an honest man who said it when I struggled, stumbled and worried. I longed to be a man with real friends – friends who knew me at my worst and loved me.

From scenes like these old Scotia’s grandeur springs, That makes her loved at home, revered abroad: Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, “An honest man ‘s the noblest work of God.”

An honest man here lies at rest, the friend of man the friend of truth the friend of age and guide of youth. Few hearts like his with virtue warmed, few heads with knowledge so informed. If there’s another world, he lives in bliss. If there is none, he made the best of this.

Candor is a proof of both a just frame of mind, and of a good tone of breeding. It is a quality that belongs equally to the honest man and to the gentleman.

There are two modes of establishing our reputation; to be praised by honest men, and to be abused by rogues.

There aren’t many honest men or women in Washington anymore. Politicians get where they are by the sheer force of their egos, not their convictions. And you know what? It’s our fault as voters. We don’t demand better candidates, so we end up getting what we deserve—on both sides of the aisle.

For at least the last 275 years the honesty of fishermen has been somewhat questionable. It should be noted that Izaak Walton whose book published in 1653 spoke not of anglers and , but anglers OR very honest men .

An honest man’s word is as good as his bond.

It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.

Public business must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise man decline, others will not; if honest man refuse it, others will not.

All privileges based on wealth, and all emnity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American.

The universe is not rich enough to buy the vote of an honest man.

The only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false.

God defend me from being an honest man according to the description which every day I see made by each man to his own glorification

One of the things I love most about Martin Luther King is that he was willing to sacrifice his popularity in favor of his integrity. He was an honest man, and he would tell the truth.

When I want a peerage, I shall buy one like an honest man.

But honest men do not pretend to know; they are candid and sincere; they love the truth; they admit their ignorance, and they say, We do not know.

If the innocent honest Man must quietly quit all he has for Peace sake, to him who will lay violent hands upon it, I desire it may be considered what kind of Peace there will be in the World, which consists only in Violence and Rapine; and which is to be maintained only for the benefit of Robbers and Oppressors.

It is curious – but you cannot make a revolution without honest men. … Every revolution has had its honest men. They are soon disposed of afterwards.

An honest man is in Hell when he is in debt.

If anybody ever dares to compare Bob Dole to Clinton, then they’re comparing a criminal to an honest man.

Dear dad, you always told me that an honest man has nothing to fear, so I’m trying my best not to be afraid.

There is a passion of reverence, almost of pity, mingling with the love of an honest man for a pure girl, which makes it the most exquisite, perhaps, of all human sentiments.

You can cheat an honest man but not make a fool out of him.

The author of McCarthyism was given the distinction of addressing the Republican National Convention. This strikes terror in the hearts of honest men.

A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he has to be an ignoramus and a rogue.

I was ever of the opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population.

Honesty is the rarest wealth anyone can possess.

Do not cast away an honest man for a villain‘s accusation.

However roguish a man may be, he always loves to deal with an honest man.

A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, repute possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie.

An honest man is always a child.

Human nature is so weak that the honest men who have no religion make me fret with their perilous virtue, as rope-dancers with their dangerous equilibrium.

Upon the great questions of origin, of destiny, of immortality, of . . . other worlds, every honest man must say, ‘I do not know.’ Upon these questions, this is the creed of intelligence.

He is a truly virtuous man who wishes always to be open to the observation of honest men.

The holy spirit means the invisible power of Jehovah, holy because he is holy. This power of Jehovah operated upon the minds of honest men who loved and who were devoted to righteousness, directing them in the writing of the Bible.

The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others… An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens…. Power is not alluring to pure minds and is not with them the primary principle of contest.

Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?

What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

I am looking for an honest man.

You cannot con an honest man.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

An honest man you may form of windle-straws, but to make a rogue you must have grist.

An honest man, that is not quite sober, has nothing to fear.

For a man who walks in the light, to stay humble is not to walk in the dark; you don’t need to project yourself to be thought an honest man.

In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn’t know what he is doing.

A prince can mak a belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a’ that; But an honest man’s aboon his might: Guid faith, he maunna fa’ that.

I read five books on the Constitution. My favorite was ‘Plain, Honest Men’ by Richard Beeman. I went on a science jag in the same way. I kept getting in arguments about evolution and being bested. So I read Charles Darwin‘s ‘On the Origin of the Species,’ a fantastic book that is not that difficult.

A rich man is an honest man–no thanks to him; for he would be a double knave, to cheat mankind when he had no need of it: he has no occasion to press upon his integrity, nor so much as to touch upon the borders of dishonesty.

Any doctrine that will not bear investigation is not a fit tenant for the mind of an honest man.

We want the full works of citizenship with no reservations. We will accept nothing less . . . This condition of freedom, equality, and democracy is not the gift of gods. It is the task of men, yes, men, brave men, honest men, determined men.

In an honest man there is always something of a child.

The thieves and killers are goin’ to have guns, so if the honest men don’t have ’em they just make it easier for the vicious.

An honest man is not accountable for the vice and folly of his trade, and therefore ought not to refuse the exercise of it. It is the custom of his country, and there is profit in it. We must live by the world, and such as we find it, so make use of it.

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens . . . There has never been a moment of my life in which I should have relinquished for it the enjoyments of my family, my farm, my friends and books.

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.

They are so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a water-closet doormat.

Candor is a proof of both a just frame of mind, and of a good tone of breeding. It is a quality that belongs equally to the honest man and to the gentleman.

They don’t keep their promises in the promised land, its getting mighty hard to find an honest man.

All my fears and cares are of this world; if there is another, an honest man has nothing to fear from it.

Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.

The doubts of an honest man contain more moral truth than the profession of faith of people under a worldly yoke.

Just like my Uncle Charlie used to say, just before he sprung the trap: He said, “You can’t cheat and honest man! Never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump!

An honest Man will receive neither Money nor Praise that is not his due.

Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man…. Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!

Truth from the mouth of an honest man and severity from a good-natured man have a double effect.

I have no idea what the mind of a lowlife scoundrel is like, but I know what the mind of an honest man is like; it is terrifying.

It is not the crook in modern business that we fear, but the honest man who doesn’t know what he is doing.

There are three difficulties in authorship; to write any thing worth the publishing — to find honest men to publish it — and to get sensible men to read it.

True education seeks to make men and women not only good mathematicians, proficient linguists, profound scientists, or brilliant literary lights, but also honest men and women with virtue, temperance, and brotherly love.

When Nikita Khrushchev wrapped himself in the bloody mantle of the Czars he broke Hungary, he broke the little Communist parties over the western world, and he broke the hearts of many honest men who had trusted a little too far, a little too long.

The only way to gall and fret effectively is for yourself to be a good and honest man.

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

The honest man, though e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men, for a’ that!

Nothing causes more consternation in a group of hypocrits than one honest man.

Live the principles and the values. Almost nobody in America is living them. Learn the truth. Live the life of our founders. Be a decent, righteous, forthright honest man or woman.

That’s the problem with the truth,” Darcy said. “Liars and honest men both claim to have it.

An honest man nearly always thinks justly.

Honest men love women; those who deceive them adore them.

An honest man, sir, is able to speak for himself, when a knave is not.

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.

Why does corruption in government always surprise us? Why do we expect anything else from it? Government is organized force. It takes our wealth and makes war. And we think honest men would do that work?

A honest man is seldom a vagrant.

Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.

We’re flimflam artists. But remember, sonny, you can’t con people unless they’re greedy to begin with. W. C. Fields had it right. You can’t cheat an honest man.

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.

I know with certainty, that [an honest man] is not to put his hand into the fire, and hold it there, till it be consumed: And thisevent, I think I can foretell with the same assurance, as that, if he throw himself out at the window, and meet with no obstruction, he will not remain a moment suspended in the air.

Public esteem is the recompense of honest men.

The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors

A miracle is the badge and brand of fraud. … No intelligent, honest man ever pretended to perform a miracle, and never will.

The mark of an honest man… is that he means what he says and knows what he means.

To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.

I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son (W A Mozart)is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition.

To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.

I think we Americans tend to put too high a price on unanimity, as if there were something dangerous and illegitimate about honest differences of opinion honestly expressed by honest men.

The walls are raised against honest men in civic life.

Who would not rather be the sufferer than the defrauder?

The trite saying that ‘honesty is the best policy‘ has met with the just criticism that honesty is not policy. The seems to be true. The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.

Do what you believe to be right, and ever hold it for a maxim, that if the skies fall through your doing right, honest men will survive the ruin.

An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie and intrigue for the benefit of his country.

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

…things I had come to find humor in would make your honest man swoon.

Many an honest man practices upon himself an amount of deceit sufficient, if practised upon another, and in a little different way, to send him to the state prison.

Women love an honest man.

To live, is to suffer; and the honest man is always fighting to be master of his own mind.

An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.

The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would distrust a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.

When a felon’s not engaged in his employment Or maturing his felonious little plans His capacity for innocent enjoyment Is just as great as any honest man’s Ah! When constabulary duty’s to be done A policeman‘s lot is not a happy one.

The trite saying that honesty is the best policy has met with the just criticism that honesty is not policy. The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.

I am not an economist. I am an honest man!

Yesterday I was on the edge Hoping everything was going to work itself out A good honest man doing the work of God Trying to make things better for Him A lover of life in a school for fools Trying to find another way to survive

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

God works wonders now and then; Behold a lawyer, an honest man.

Me, I’m dishonest, and you can always trust a dishonest man to be dishonest. Honestly, it’s the honest ones you have to watch out for.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.

Every honest man will suppose honest acts to flow from honest principles, and the rogues may rail without intermission.

In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.

There is no honest man! not one, that can resist the attraction of gold!

It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man – but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.

If an honest man is the noblest work of God, then Mr. Lincoln‘s title to high nobility is clear and unquestioned.

A rogue does not laugh in the same way that an honest man does; a hypocrite does not shed the tears of a man of good faith. All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face.

This idea that you can’t be an honest man and a Washington politician is a myth, a crock made up by sellouts and careerist hacks who don’t stand for anything and are impatient with people who do. It’s possible to do this job with honor and dignity.

The hypocrite recognizes the honest man as his deadly enemy.

An honest man is respected by all parties.

An honest man with an open Bible and a pad and pencil is sure to find out what is wrong with him very quickly.

Letters are meaningless unless put together correctly. Words are worthless unless backed by truth. Sentences are handed out and judged accordingly, but only genuinely honest men or women can create writings that change the world forever.

To one who said, “I do not believe that there is an honest man in the world,” another replied, “It is impossible that any one man should know all the world, but quite possible that one may know himself.”

Because I never thought the Lord would treat me any different from any other honest man or that I had an official position that compelled the Lord to help me in any other way than He would help any other man.

With the same honest views, the most honest men often form different conclusions.

With a woman, always make good use of a secret. She will be proportionally grateful to you, like a scoundrel who grants his respect to an honest man he has been unable to swindle.

I think most corporate executives are good honorable honest men and women who do good work.

‘Tis certain that a serious attention to the sciences and liberal arts softens and humanizes the temper, and cherishes those fine emotions in which true virtue and honor consist. It rarely, very rarely happens that a man of taste and learning is not, at least, an honest man, whatever frailties may attend him.

Of all the animals, man is the only one that lies.

I call God to witness that as a private person I have done nothing unbeseeming an honest man, nor, as I bear the place of a public man, have I done anything unworthy of my place.

The honest Man takes Pains, and then enjoys Pleasures; the knave takes Pleasure, and then suffers Pains.

There is no profit in deceit. An honest man knows revenge is not sweet.

No honest man will argue on every side

No flattery, boy! an honest man cannot live by it; it is a little, sneaking art, which knaves use to cajole and soften fools withal.

Men are as we have always known them, neither better nor worse from the hearts of rogues there springs a latent honesty, from the depths of honest men there emerges a brutish appetite – a thirst for extermination, a desire for blood.

….honest men are few when it comes to themselves.

Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.

We vote for Perot. We think he’s a great, marvelous, honest man. We send money to his campaign, even though he is one of the richest capitalists in our culture. Imagine, sending money to Perot! It’s unbelievable, yet it’s part of that worship of individuality.

Honest men live on charity in their age; the almshouses are full of men who never stole a copper penny. Honest men are the fools and the saints.

The silly when deceived exclaim loudly; the fool complains; the honest man walks away and is silent.

The main trouble with being an honest man was that it lost you all your illusions.

Who is the honest man?
He that doth still and strongly good pursue
To God, his neighbor, and himself most true:
Whom neither force nor fawning can
Unpin, or wrench from giving all their due.

He’s an honest man – you could shoot craps with him over the telephone.

Never give a sucker an even break.

Ambassadors are honest men sent abroad to lie for their countries.

When rogues fall out, honest men get into their own.

An honest man will continue to be so though surrounded on all sides by rogues.

From day one, I’ve always tried to be an honest man. I ran for Congress to make a difference and not to just be another politician.

An honest man is strange when he is among dishonest men, but it is a good kind of strangeness.

When treating with liars, even an honest man must lie.

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.

Every honest man lives for himself. Every man worth calling a man lives for himself. The one who doesn’t – doesn’t live at all.

It requires time to bring honest Men to think & determine alike even in important Matters. Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason.

We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.

The honest man might observe… that no one gets something for nothing; that politicians go in poor and go out rich; that the Government screws up everything it touches; and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.

Is there a difference between a man who thinks that honesty is the best policy, and an honest man?

That which we call wit consists much in quickness and tricks, and is so full of lightness that it seldom goes with judgment and solidity; but when they do meet, it is commonly in an honest man.

There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.

I like honest men of all colors.

How many honest men do you know? Take the sinners away from the saints, you’re lucky to end up with Abraham Lincoln.

An honest man’s the noblest work of God.

I’m an honest man. I am living my life. I’m not stealing. And I’ve never been ashamed of who I am – I am a Roma.

Tobacco is the passion of honest men and he who lives without tobacco is not worthy of living.

An honest man is always a child.
[Lat., Semper bonus homo tiro est.]

The life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity.

To an honest man, it is an honor to have remembered his duty.

the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life.

The difference there is betwixt honor and honesty seems to be chiefly the motive; the mere honest man does that from duty which the man of honor does for the sake of character.