For as laws are necessary that good manners be preserved, so there is need of good manners that law may be maintained.

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

The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.

A government which does not trust its citizens to be armed is not itself to be trusted.

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

There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new order of things..... Whenever his enemies have occasion to attack the innovator they do so with the passion of partisans, while the others defend him sluggishly so that the innovator and his party alike are vulnerable.

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.