Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli Quotes
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In our own days we have seen no princes accomplish great results save those who have been accounted miserly.
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Thus it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, sincere, religious, and also to be so; but you must have the mind so disposed that when it is needful to be otherwise you may be able to change to the opposite qualities.
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Still, a prince should make himself feared in such a way that if he does not gain love, he at any rate avoids hatred; for fear and the absence of hatred may well go together, and will be always attained by one who abstains from interfering with the property of his citizens and subjects or with their women.
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A prince is also respected when he is a true friend and a true enemy; that is, when he declares himself on the side of one prince against another without any reservation.
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Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised.
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Where the very safety of the country depends upon the resolution to be taken, no consideration of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, nor of glory or of shame, should be allowed to prevail. But putting all other considerations aside, the only question should be: What course will save the life and liberty of the country?
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All the States and Governments by which men are or ever have been ruled, have been and are either Republics or Princedoms.
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All the armed prophets conquered; all the unarmed ones perished.
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....it cannot be called ingenuity to kill one's fellow citizens, to betray friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion; by these means one can aquire power but not glory.
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He who has once begun to live by rapine always finds reasons for taking what is not his.
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The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
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States that rise quickly, just as all the other things of nature that are born and grow rapidly, cannot have roots and ramifications; the first bad weather kills them...
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A prudent man... must behave like those archers who, if they are skillful, when the target seems too distant, know the capabilities of their bow and aim a good deal higher than their objective, not in order to shoot so high but so that by aiming high they can reach the target.
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For the mob is always impressed by appearances and by results, and the world is composed of the mob.
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Besides what has been said, people are fickle by nature; and it is a simple to convince them of something but difficult to hold them in that conviction; and, therefore, affairs should be managed in such a way that when they no longer believe, they can be made to believe by force.
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The unarmed man is not just defenseless - he is also contemptible.
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One arises from a low to a high station more often by using fraud instead of force.
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Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.
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When every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove themselves elsewhere.
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War is a profession by which a man cannot live honorably; an employment by which the soldier, if he would reap any profit, is obliged to be false, rapacious, and cruel.
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Some princes, so as to hold securely the state, have disarmed their subjects, others have kept their subject towns distracted by factions...Our forefathers, and those who were reckoned wise, were accustomed to say that it was necessary to hold Pistoia [an Italian city] by factions and Pisa by fortress, and with this idea they fostered quarrels in some of their tributary towns so as to keep possession of them the more easily.
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It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.
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Benefits should be granted little by little, so that they may be better enjoyed.
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In war, discipline can do more than fury.