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.
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"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."
"Men are so simple and yield so readily to the necessities of the moment that he who deceives will always find someone who will let himself be deceived."
"It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both."
"Nature creates few men brave, industry makes many."
"It is necessary for a prince, if he wishes to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case."
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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