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

The end of the republic is to enervate and to weaken all other bodies so as to increase its own body.

It makes him hated above all things, as I have said, to be rapacious, and to be a violator of the property and women of his subjects, from both of which he must abstain.

Speaking generally, men are ungrateful, fickle, hypocritical, fearful odanger and covetous ogain.

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.

...the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.

For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.