My Greek friend has told me a Greek saying, which roughly translates to:
The thief screams to frighten the landlord
Effectively it means: You are only making a fuss so that nobody accuses you, and you are the one who is guilty.
This seems like a very universal concept, and I was surprised to realise that I couldn't think of the English equivalent to this saying. Is there one?
Best Answer
Though it is basically a misinterpretation,¹ the phrase
is commonly shoehorned into use conveying the sense of the Greek idiom in question.
In practice, the reference is often more oblique, with only “protest too much” retained (possibly even altered slightly to fit the structure of a given sentence), but sometimes the reference is indicated more overtly by the anachronistic appearance of “doth” or “methinks”.
¹As noted on the Wikipedia page for this quote, we've back-applied a modern definition of “protest”.