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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More from Machiavelli
"Thus it happens in affairs of state, that to try to avoid one trouble often leads to another."
"A wise prince, therefore, ought to find a means by which his subjects will always in every sort and kind of circumstance have need of the state and of him, and then they will always be faithful to him…"
"Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them."
"There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others."
"A prince being thus obliged to know well how to act as a beast must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves."
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.