Machiavelli — "All men are bad and ever ready to use their inherent baseness whenever they have…"
All men are bad and ever ready to use their inherent baseness whenever they have a free opportunity to do so.
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More from Machiavelli
"A prince who is not himself wise cannot be well advised."
"For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often even more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are."
"For where the very safety of the country depends upon the resolution to be taken, no considerations whatever of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, nor of glory or disgrace, should be allowed t…"
"To conquer a people, and then not to live among them, is to lose them."
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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.