knavery

From their study of English history, they learned what might be called the law of knavery: there aren’t any good ways to get rid of a bad king.

From The New Yorker ● Oct. 21, 2019

“I only know that it is mixed, that you cannot separate good from bad, that wisdom, courage and benevolence exist alongside knavery, greed and stupidity; heroism and fortitude alongside vainglory, cruelty and corruption.”

From New York Times ● Mar. 14, 2018

He looks upon the Trojan War, and all the warriors who risk their lives in it, with a vision that strips all noble motives away and sees only lechery, roguery, and knavery.

From The New Yorker ● Aug. 9, 2016

We like to think of our transgressions as caused less by our own knavery than by the wrong genes or maltreatment in childhood.

From The Guardian ● Mar. 7, 2011

I wish for some way to warn Cristiana of the new king’s knavery.

From "Ophelia" by Lisa Klein

Told in the fictitious third person of Jim's confidant and publicity man, it records the entire gamut of his knaveries, but gives him where possible the benefit of the doubt.

From Time Magazine Archive

Ah! our knave has found his match in another, who has far better tricks in his sack, a thousand kinds of knaveries and of wily words.

From The Eleven Comedies, Volume 1 by Aristophanes

Tartuffe, a knave, a creation of Molière's, who makes a cloak of religion to cover his knaveries, and the name of the play in which the character appears, Molière's greatest.

From The Nuttall Encyclopædia Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge by P. Austin Nuttall

Accordingly, justice has been sold with brazen impudence, knaveries and tricks and treachery have triumphed, and a multitude of simple, innocent, down-trodden creatures, poor in spirit and impoverished in substance, have wept tears of blood.

From The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi Volume the Second by Count Carlo Gozzi

String-actuated knaveries, more or less similar to the mouse-in-the-kitchen one, are always devised for the plaguing of a new night nurse.

From Observations of an Orderly Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital by Ward Muir