Machiavelli — "Politics have no relation to morals."
Politics have no relation to morals.
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More from Machiavelli
"The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves."
"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."
"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."
"Hatred is acquired as much by good works as by evil."
"A prince must have no other object, no other thought, nor take anything else for his art, but war and its orders and discipline."
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.