Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times.
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"A wise prince, therefore, ought to find a means by which his subjects will always in every sort and kind of circumstance have need of the state and of him, and then they will always be faithful to him…"
"A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise."
"The vulgar are always taken by appearances and by the outcome of a thing; and in the world there are only the vulgar."
"For it must be noted that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge slight injuries, but not severe ones; hence the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such…"
"For of men it may generally be affirmed, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous."
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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