“Fair is foul, and foul is fair, hover through fog and filthy air.”
Variant: Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
Source: Macbeth
as quoted in "Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism" by Robert Skidelsy http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1256603608595872&url=www.geocities.com/monedem/keyn.html <br class="br">Essays in Persuasion (1931), Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) <br class="br">Context: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease … But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair, hover through fog and filthy air.”
Variant: Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
Source: Macbeth
W.B. Yeats book The Winding Stair and Other Poems
Crazy Jane Talks With The Bishop http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1471/, st. 2 <br class="br">The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
“Times go by turns and chances change by course,
From foul to fair, from better hap to worse.”
Robert Southwell (1561–1595) English Jesuit
Source: Times Go by Turns, Line 5; p. 47.
“Friendship: A ship big enough for two in fair weather, but only one in foul.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
John Keats Letter to Richard Woodhouse
It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philospher, delights the camelion poet.
Letter to Richard Woodhouse (October 27, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)
Variant: The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers.
Source: 1900s, A History of the American People, Vol. 9 (1902), p. 58