Quotes About Machiavelli's The Prince

#1. For a prince should have two fears: one, internal concerning his subjects; the other, external, concerning foreign powers. From the latter he can always defend himself by his good troops and friends; and he will always have good friends if he has good troops.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#2. War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#3. A prince need trouble little about conspiracies when the people are well disposed, but when they are hostile and hold him in hatred, then he must fear everything and everybody.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#4. To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people

Niccolo Machiavelli

#5. Thus a wise prince will think of ways to keep his citizens of every sort and under every circumstance dependent on the state and on him; and then they will always be trustworthy

Niccolo Machiavelli

#6. And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion. The Prince, XVIII, 5

Niccolo Machiavelli

#7. So far as he is able, a prince should stick to the path of good but, if the necessity arises, he should know how to follow evil.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#8. You have to be a prince to understand the people, and you have to belong to the people to understand the princes ...

Niccolo Machiavelli

#9. There are many who think a wise prince ought, when he has the chance, to foment astutely some enmity, so that by suppressing it he will augment his greatness.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#10. It is necessary that the prince should know how to color his nature well, and how to be a hypocrite and dissembler. For men are so simple, and yield so much to immediate necessity, that the deceiver will never lack dupes.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#11. 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.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#12. A prince need take little account of conspiracies if the people are disposed in his favor.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#13. It is a foolish prince who entrusts the safety of his lands to hired men.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#14. It is much safer for the prince to be feared than loved, but he ought to avoid making himself hated.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#15. All ideas advanced to deal with the Florentine noise problem, the Florentine traffic problem, are Utopian, and nobody believes in them, just as nobody believed in Machiavelli's Prince, a Utopian image of the ideally self-interested despot.

Mary McCarthy

#16. These opportunities, then, gave these men the chance they needed, and their great abilities made them recognize it.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#17. The prince must consider, as has been in part said before, how to avoid those things which will make him hated or contemptible; and as often as he shall have succeeded he will have fulfilled his part, and he need not fear any danger in other reproaches.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#18. The political tradition of ancient thought, filtered in Italy by Machiavelli, says one thing clearly: every prince needs allies, and the bigger the responsibility, the more allies he needs.

Silvio Berlusconi

#19. As the observance of divine institutions is the cause of the greatness of republics, so the disregard of them produces their ruin; for where the fear of God is wanting, there the country will come to ruin, unless it be sustained the fear of the prince, which temporarily supply the want of religion.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#20. The best fortress which a prince can possess is the affection of his people.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#21. A Prince should esteem the great, but must not make himself odious to the people.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#22. The prince must be a lion, but he must also know how to play the fox.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#23. Being feared and not hated go well together, and the prince can always do this if he does not touch the property or the women of his citizens and subjects.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#24. Therefore a wise prince ought to adopt such a course that his citizens will always in every sort and kind of circumstance have need of the state and of him, and then he will always find them faithful.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#25. This again results naturally and necessarily from the circumstance that the Prince cannot avoid giving offence to his new subjects, either in respect of the troops he quarters on them, or of some other of the numberless vexations attendant on a new acquisition.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#26. One of the best and most efficacious methods for dealing with such a State, is for the Prince who acquires it to go and dwell there in person, since this will tend to make his tenure more secure and lasting.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#27. Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#28. 'The Prince' was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. 'Rules for Radicals' is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.

Saul Alinsky

#29. And the prince who has relied solely on their words, without making other preparations, is ruined, for the friendship which is gained by purchase and not through grandeur and nobility of spirit is merited but is not secured, and at times is not to be had.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#30. It is a common fault of men not to reckon on storms in fair weather.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#31. The prince who relies upon their words, without having otherwise provided for his security, is ruined; for friendships that are won by awards, and not by greatness and nobility of soul, although deserved, yet are not real, and cannot be depended upon in time of adversity.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#32. A prince who is not himself wise cannot be wisely advised ... Good advice depends on the shrewdness of the prince who seeks it, and not the shrewdness of the prince on good advice.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#33. The wise prince, therefore, has always avoided these arms and turned to his own and has been willing rather to lose with them than to conquer with the others, not deeming that a real victory which is gained with the arms of others.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#34. He [the prince] holds to what is right when he can but knows how to do wrong when he must.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#35. In general you must either pamper people or destroy them; harm them just a little and they'll hit back; harm them seriously and they won't be able to. So if you're going to do people harm, make sure you needn't worry about their reaction.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#36. [ ... ] the state is not immoral but amoral; half of it exists outside morality

Jacques Barzun

#37. Just as artists who draw landscapes get down in the valley to study the mountains and go up to the mountains to look down on the valley, so one has to be a prince to get to know the character of a people and a man of the people to know the character of a prince.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#38. I say, then, that hereditary States, accustomed to the family of their Prince, are maintained with far less difficulty than new States, since all that is required is that the Prince shall not depart from the usages of his ancestors, trusting for the rest to deal with events as they arise.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#39. In republics there is more life, more hatred, more desire for revenge. - MACHIAVELLI, The Prince, chapter five

Christopher Celenza

#40. For he who quells disorder by a very few signal examples will in the end be more merciful than he who from too great leniency permits things to take their course and so to result in rapine and bloodshed; for these hurt the whole State, whereas the severities of the Prince injure individuals only.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#41. Therefore it must be inferred that good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good counsels.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#42. If they lacked the opportunity, the strength of their sprit would have been sapped; if they had lacked ability, the opportunity would have been wasted.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#43. A prince who is free to do as he pleases is unreasonable, and a people that is free to do as it pleases is not wise. If we consider princes restricted by laws and a people bound by laws, we will find greater qualities in the people than in the princes.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#44. Those who believe that where great personages are concerned new favors cause old injuries to be forgotten deceive themselves.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#45. He who becomes a Prince through the favour of the people should always keep on good terms with them; which it is easy for him to do, since all they ask is not to be oppressed

Niccolo Machiavelli

#46. Returning to the question of being feared or loved, I conclude that since men love at their own will and fear at the will of the prince, a wise prince must build a foundation on what is his own, and not on what belongs to others.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#47. The Machiavelli of the 20th century will be an advertising man, his Prince, a textbook of the art and science of fooling all the people all the time.

Aldous Huxley

#48. [The prince] dare not let ethics keep him from doing whatever evil must be done to preserve himself and the state.

Jacques Barzun

#49. But since a Prince should know how to use the beast's nature wisely, he ought of beasts to choose both the lion and the fox; for the lion cannot guard himself from the toils, nor the fox from wolves. He must therefore be a fox to discern toils, and a lion to drive off wolves.

Niccolo Machiavelli