Machiavelli — "He who blinds himself to reality must prepare to be destroyed."
He who blinds himself to reality must prepare to be destroyed.
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More from Machiavelli
"Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number of men who are not good."
"The common people are always caught by appearances and by the outcome of a thing; and in the world there are only the common people."
"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."
"Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times."
"It is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity."
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.