To pretend to have any scruple about buying smuggled goods, though a manifest encouragement to the violation of the revenue laws, and to the perjury which almost always attends it, would, in most countries, be regarded as one of those pedantic pieces of hypocrisy which, instead of gaining credit with anybody, serve only to expose the person who affects to practise them to the suspicion of being a greater knave than most of his neighbours.

For if thou aim at nothing beyond the mere delight of it, or gaining some scrap of knowledge, thou art but a poor, spiritless knave.

One plays the villain, another the knave, this one the merchant, that the soldier, one the sharp-witted fool, another the foolish lover; and when the play is over, and they have put off the dresses they wore in it, all the actors become equal."

This being as it is, it is clear that this ape speaks by the spirit of the devil; and I am astonished they have not denounced him to the Holy Office, and put him to the question, and forced it out of him by whose virtue it is that he divines; because it is certain this ape is not an astrologer; neither his master nor he sets up, or knows how to set up, those figures they call judiciary, which are now so common in Spain that there is not a jade, or page, or old cobbler, that will not undertake to set up a figure as readily as pick up a knave of cards from the ground, bringing to nought the marvellous truth of the science by their lies and ignorance.

It's another sort of cat they must throw in my face, and not that poor scurvy knave.

And why should I give them to you if I had them, you knave and blockhead?

You're not from Miguelturra, but some knave sent here from hell to tempt me.

They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man’s goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage.

The Knave of Hearts is a 1919 British silent romance film directed by Floyd Martin Thornton and starring James Knight, Evelyn Boucher and Harry Agar Lyons.

Hanspeter Born has argued that Greene's attack on the "upstart Crow" was provoked because, in his view, Shakespeare may have rewritten parts of Greene's play "A Knack to Know a Knave".However, considering that Thomas Nashe is “by far the stronger suspect” for having written the passage regarding the “upstart Crow”, Katherine Duncan-Jones points to instances in which Nashe may have had reason to be provoked.