Princes should delegate to others the enactment of unpopular measures and keep in their own hands the means of winning favours.

Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not to suffer.

We must distinguish between those who depend on others, that is between those who to achieve their purposes can force the issue and those who must use persuasion. In the second case, they always come to grief, having achieved nothing; when, however, they depend on their own resources and can force the issue, then they are seldom endangered.

Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.

Many have dreamed up republics and principalities that have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.

Men as a whole judge more with their eyes than with their hands.

We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either.