it's an ill bird that fouls its own nest
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English
[edit]Proverb
[edit]it's an ill bird that fouls its own nest
- A condemnation of anyone who damages his or her own interests, reputation, or group.
- 1872, John Ruskin, The Eagle's Nest:
- They say it's an ill bird that fouls its own nest. My own feeling is that a well-behaved bird will neither foul its own nest nor another's, but that, finding it in any wise foul, it will openly say so, and clean it.
- 1893, Robert Louis Stevenson, Catriona:
- It's an ill bird that fouls his own nest, and we are all Scots folk and all Hieland.
- 2005, Richard Ostrofsky, Sharing Realities: Toward an Epistemology of Conversation, →ISBN, page 173:
- The saying, “It's an ill bird that fouls its own nest” expresses the most universal of ethical norms, and is probably the source of all such norms.
- 2013, Charles Macnab, Understanding the Thomas D'Arcy McGee Assassination, →ISBN:
- He admitted then to having had, for two years, “documents in [his] possession sufficient to have destroyed [the Fenians operating in Montreal], but [he had] thought it was an ill bird that fouled its own nest.