Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli Quotes
-
Men are always averse to enterprises in which they foresee difficulties.
-
Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not to suffer.
-
God creates men, but they choose each other.
-
Though fraud in all other actions be odious, yet in matters of war it is laudable and glorious, and he who overcomes his enemies by stratagem is as much to be praised as he who overcomes them by force.
-
Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.
-
Nothing feeds upon itself as liberality does.
-
If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were.
-
It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.
-
For whoever conquers a free Town, and does not demolish it, commits a great Error, and may expect to be ruin 'd himself.
-
He who builds on the people, builds on the mud...
-
The state is not an organism capable of bringing either moral or material improvements to the populace...but merely a vehicle of power for the men and party in power.
-
Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty; for faithful servants are always servants, and honest men are always poor; nor do any ever escape from servitude but the bold and faithless, or from poverty, but the rapacious and fraudulent.
-
Speaking generally, men are ungrateful, fickle, hypocritical, fearful odanger and covetous ogain.
-
Without doubt, ferocious and disordered men are much weaker than timid and ordered ones. For order chases fear from men and disorder lessens ferocity.
-
....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.
-
A blast in the human breast is nothing to boast of.
-
When men receive favours from someone they expected to do them ill, they are under a greater obligation to their benefactor.
-
The unarmed man is not just defenseless - he is also contemptible.
-
Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations.
-
Men seldom rise from low condition to high rank without employing either force or fraud, unless that rank should be attained either by gift or inheritance.
-
A prince must be prudent enough to know how to escape the bad reputation of those vices that would lose the state for him, and must protect himself from those that will not lose it for him, if this is possible; but if he cannot, he need not concern himself unduly if he ignores these less serious vices.
-
A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.
-
A wise man will see to it that his acts always seem voluntary and not done by compulsion, however much he may be compelled by necessity.
-
They have not any difficulties on the way up because they fly, but they have many when they reach the summit.