it's an ill bird that fouls its own nest

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English

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Proverb

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it's an ill bird that fouls its own nest

  1. 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.

See also

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