, when
they have no need of warmth, but leave them naked when cold weather
comes; and since there are so few that prove otherwise, it is not wisdom
to rely on any.

He is of opinion that no men are so fit to be employed and trusted as
fools or knaves; for the first understand no right, the others regard
none; and whensoever there falls out an occasion that may prove of great
importance if the infamy and danger of the dishonesty be not too
apparent, they are the only persons that are fit for the undertaking.
They are both equally greedy of employment; the one out of an itch to be
thought able, and the other honest enough, to be trusted, as by use and
practice they sometimes prove. For the general business of the world
lies, for the most part, in routines and forms, of which there are none
so exact observers as those who understand nothing else to divert them,
as carters use to blind their fore-horses on both sides that they may
see only forward, and so keep the road the better, and men that aim at a
mark use to shut one eye that they may see the surer with the other. If
fools are not notorious, they have far more persons to deal with of
their own elevation (who understand one another better) than they have
of those that are above them, which renders them fitter for many
businesses than wiser men, and they believe themselves to be so for all.
For no man ever thought himself a fool that was one, so confident does
their ignorance naturally render them, and confidence is no contemptible
qualification in the management of human affairs; and as blind men have
secret artifices and tricks to supply that defect and find out their
ways, which those who have their eyes and are but hoodwinked are utterly
unable to do, so fools have always little crafts and frauds in all their
transactions which wiser men would never have thought upon, and by those
they frequently arrive at very great wealth, and as great success in all
their undertakings. For all fools are but feeble and impotent knaves,
that have as strong and vehement inclinations to all sorts of dishonesty
as the most notorious of those engineers, but want abilities to put them
in practice; and as they are always found to be the most obstinate and
intractable people to be prevailed upon by reason or conscience, so they
are as easy to submit to their superiors--that is, knaves--by whom they
are always observed to be governed, as all corporations are wont to
choose their magistrate