Machiavelli — "For a man who wishes to make a profession of good in everything must necessarily…"
For a man who wishes to make a profession of good in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good.
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More from Machiavelli
"He who is the cause of another becoming powerful is ruined."
"When a prince has once made a reputation, he can easily overcome any enterprise, even if he has little strength."
"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."
"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."
"It is a common error among men to believe that the shortest way to conquer a thing is to try to obtain it by force."
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.