For of men it may generally be affirmed that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are entirely yours, offering you their blood, their property, their lives, and their sons, as I have before said, when the necessity is remote; but when it approaches nearer to you they turn against you.
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"Hence it comes that all armed prophets have conquered and unarmed ones have failed."
"A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought… but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is the only art befitting one who commands."
"For the nature of men is such that they are much more bound by the benefits they confer than by those they receive."
"All men are bad and ever ready to use their inherent baseness whenever they have a free opportunity to do so."
"It is better to be impetuous than cautious, because Fortune is a woman, and if you wish to control her, it is necessary to beat and ill-use her."
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.
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