Machiavelli — "A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise."
A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.
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"If a prince wants to keep his state, he must learn how to be not good, and to use or not use this according to the necessity."
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"It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are bad, and that they will use their malignity of mind whenever they have a free opportunity to do so."
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About Machiavelli (1469-1527)
Florentine diplomat and political theorist whose The Prince (written 1513) became the founding text of political realism and gave us the adjective 'Machiavellian.' Closely associated with Francesco Guicciardini (fellow Florentine political analyst and historian). For an intellectual contrast, see Erasmus of Rotterdam, Dutch humanist and The Education of a Christian Prince author (1516) — Erasmus's princely-instruction manual was published three years after Machiavelli's, for the same European audience, and is the explicit Christian-virtue alternative to Machiavellian power-realism. The cleanest 'realism vs idealism' founding pairing in modern political theory.