"Machiavellian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... riding-whip dreaded that a letter of dismissal was prudently delivered. As a result, bloodshed was avoided; and Mlle Lola has solaced herself with the reflection that she has been the victim of the Machiavellian cabal of Russia, still angry at her routing of Muscovite ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... photograph which he circulated of himself, seated in a splendid chair upon a promontory by the Black Sea, wearing the appropriate archaic robes, and with a look of profound meditation on his otherwise Machiavellian features, was exactly what he thought a ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... end of his rope for me to feel spiteful," he said, "though I am quite prepared to grant that he may be capable of considerable mischief yet. A man who has the sublime effrontery to attempt to come to an agreement with two countries, each behind the other's back, is a little more than Machiavellian, isn't he?" ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... same bitter experience of mankind, to bear upon his discussion of the faith of princes. The chapter which is entitled 'How princes ought to keep their word' is one of the most brilliantly composed and thoroughly Machiavellian of the whole treatise. He starts with the assertion that to fight the battles of life in accordance with law is human, to depend on force is brutal; yet when the former method is insufficient, the latter must be adopted. A prince should know ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... By a Machiavellian stratagem the primary larva of the Oil-beetle or the Sitaris has penetrated the Anthophora's cell; it has settled on the egg, which is its first food and its life-raft in one. What becomes of it once the ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... Barabas as an upright merchant, and so discover a real tragedy in the moral downfall which results from the governor's injustice. Such a point of view is attractive, and would raise the character of the play considerably. But it has many obstacles in its way, not the least being the Machiavellian prologue and the difficulty of believing that any dramatist of the sixteenth century would wish, or dare, to present to an English audience the picture of an honest, ill-treated Jew. The confiscation which we regard as an injustice was ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... cousin's marvellous beauty, her rarest charm lay in her gracious manner, her unobtrusive vivacity, and her quaint combination of Sarah's Machiavellian wisdom with the intense femininity of Eve. Add to these qualities the unmistakable mark which a pure heart leaves on the face, and we complete the picture of one who in a short time was acknowledged to be without a peer in Whitehall, the most famous beauty ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... members were declared ineligible for a seat in the legislature that was to replace them. The members of the Right on this occasion went with their bitter foes of the Extreme Left, and to both parties have been imputed sinister and Machiavellian motives. The Right, aware that their own return to the new Assembly was impossible, were delighted to reduce the men with whom they had been carrying on incensed battle for two long years, to their own obscurity and impotence. Robespierre, on the other hand, is accused of a jealous ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... suddenly assumed a Machiavellian air, and said, for the benefit of the butler and footman, in a high, ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... right," he began with a certain satisfaction in this rare opportunity for Machiavellian diplomacy, "it's all fixed now. Rosey tumbled to it at once, partiklerly when I said you was bound to go. 'But wot makes Mr. Renshaw go, father,' sez she; 'wot makes everybody run away from the ship?' sez she, rather peart like and sassy for her. 'Mr. Renshaw ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... are they? Vanished from these waters; not a Seventy-four of them to be seen!'—Have got foul in the underworks, or otherwise some blunder has happened; and the blockading Fleet of perfidious Albion has had to quit its post, and run to Gibraltar to refit. That, I guess, was the Machiavellian stroke of Art they had done; without investigating Haddock and Company [as indignant Honorable Members did], I will wager, That and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... thirty cents." Surely in the circle of their friends and relatives there must be a little girl who could be borrowed and introduced—oh, casually and with infinite tact!—into their menage for a few months. Mr. Prescott, well pleased with himself, winked a Machiavellian wink and sought his wife, ostensibly to consult her, but in reality to inform her that he had made up his mind, and that it would be her happy privilege to attend to the trivial details of carrying out ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... redeem our long inferiority in Machiavellian studies, and it will, I think, be found that he has given a more completely satisfactory explanation of The Prince than any country possessed before. His annotated edition supplies all the solvents of a famous problem in the history of Italy and the literature of politics. In ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... dealer, it seems, had received an order for a machine, but, being unable to deliver it, and wishing to avoid the penalties attending a breach of the contract, he had to resort to guile. The following letter to a confederate at once displays him as a Machiavellian and introduces us to that inconvenient thing, a Far ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... him morally than I had ever felt before. There was a squint-eyed shrewdness in the way he involved and disposed of the Presiding Elder that was wittily familiar to me, and all the more diverting because William never suspected the Machiavellian character of his conduct. He kept his eye on God, as usual, letting not his soul's right hand know what his left one ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... very Machiavellian speech; it doesn't deserve an answer. I want to see as many countries as ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... my impatience, that morning I was invited into several huts for the purpose of drinking sour milk. A malicious joy filled my soul, as about noon, the Machiavellian Captain of the "Reed" managed to cast anchor, after driving his crazy craft through a sea which the violent Shimal was flinging in hollow curves foam-fringed upon the strand. I stood on the shore making signs for ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... Sir Symond d'Ewes i. 405: 'Being only misled by some Machiavellian politics who seemed zealous for the liberty of ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... had taken a lifelong vow of separation from the British Isles and all things civilized, when after all it is only one short year out of my allotted span of life that I have promised to Mission work? Your steamer letter, with its Machiavellian arguments for returning immediately and directly from St. John's, was duly received. Of my unfitness for the work there is no possible doubt, no shadow of doubt whatever, and therein you and I are at one. But you will ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... to say that any amount of public danger can justify a system like this, we do not say on Christian principles, we do not say on the principles of a high morality, but even on principles of Machiavellian policy. It is true that great emergencies call for activity and vigilance; it is true that they justify severity which, in ordinary times, would deserve the name of cruelty. But indiscriminate severity can never, under any circumstances, be useful. It is plain that the whole efficacy ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... upon a bench from a sense of exhaustion. No creature of her sex was ever played upon like an instrument with more Machiavellian penetration than the marquise ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... Meanwhile Machiavellian doctrines not being forbidden to aristocracies, these people appeal to German Jingoism, to German patriotism, to all the passions which move one people who are jealous of another. All this is meant to hide under a patriotic exterior ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... but considering them in advance as possible contingencies, he exercised an unobtrusive but masterful authority when the necessity for action came. He played an honest game of diplomacy. What others did with Machiavellian intrigue or a cynical indifference to ways and means, he accomplished with the cards on the table in plain view, and with motives and objects frankly disclosed. No one ever thought his straightforward methods clumsy, or unbusinesslike, or deficient in cleverness. In like manner ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... unforeseen incident occurred the night before the Saluria landed which caused him suddenly to change his plans. He was just ready to go below for the night when an overmastering desire for one more word with Bobby seized him. By a bit of Machiavellian strategy he had outwitted Andy that afternoon, and had her entirely to himself for ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... bas-relief contrives two or three planes of figures for the presentation of his ruling group. Yet there appears to my mind a defect of accomplishment, rather than a deliberate intention, in the delineation of Orsino. He seems meant to be the wily, crafty, Machiavellian reptile, whose calculating wickedness should form a contrast to the daemonic, reckless, almost maniacal fiendishness of old Francesco Cenci. But this conception of him wavers; his love for Beatrice is too delicately ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... The Machiavellian policy of endeavouring to hold both the Servians and Bosnians in check, by pitting the one against the other, was of doubtful expediency; and, as the event proved, tended materially to weaken the imperial cause by depriving it of the aid of the Bosnian ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... this end it has suited her purpose to declare all attempts at maintaining the outward appearances of equality between the Powers of Europe to be Machiavellian schemes against her existence; or to cite the Kaiser's own words, "to deprive Germany of her place in ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... the saw-grinders, and entered their rooms with no little interest, for they were an envied trade. They had been for many years governed by Grotait, than whom no man in England saw clearer; though such men as Amboyne saw further. Grotait, by a system of Machiavellian policy, ingeniously devised and carried out, nobly, basely, craftily, forcibly, benevolently, ruthlessly, whichever way best suited the particular occasion, had built a model Union; and still, with unremitting zeal and vigilance, contrived to keep numbers ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... His face assumed a look of resignation: these old ladies made his life a martyrdom. He used to tell the "fellers" that he spent one half his time carrying orders back and forth from the Old Ladies' Home. But now, in spite of his meekness of manner, he did not intend to take this cut back. So with Machiavellian skill he ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... writers to jump to the conclusion that it was designed to cut out a portion of Australia for occupation by the French; that, under the thin disguise of being charged with a scientific mission, Baudin was in reality an emissary of Machiavellian statecraft, making a cunning move in the great game of world-politics. The author has, in an earlier book* endeavoured to show that such was not the case. (* Terre Napoleon (London, 1910). Since that book was published, I have had the advantage of reading ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... of all his Machiavellian wisdom, Dr. Riccabocca had been foiled in his attempt to seduce Leonard Fairfield into his service, even though he succeeded in partially winning over the widow to his views. For to her he represented the worldly advantages of the thing. Lenny would learn to be ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... British Radical friends, would be thirty-six strong, the old Conservatives eight, and some ten or so would "wait on providence or rather on patronage."[14] In Sydenham's last days, the government majority, which he had so subtly, and by means so machiavellian, got together, had vanished. Reformers, not all of them so scrupulous as Baldwin, were ready to ruin a government which kept them from a complete triumph. Sir Allan MacNab with his old die-hards, fulminating against all enemies of the British tradition, ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... accused," he cried, "I forgive you for the fatal error you are about to commit, and which nothing can repair! We are the victims of some mysterious and Machiavellian power. Marthe Michu was inveigled by vile perfidy. You will discover this too late, when the evil you now do ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... admit with no grounds to speak of, that I might have been a great success in that most interesting profession. One never knows, and by putting my foot in it very conscientiously all round, I might have earned for myself a reputation of Machiavellian cunning! ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... give myself unnecessary trouble; but I know that old man's Machiavellian cleverness only too well; and I am inclined to look with suspicion upon every action of his. My first business on returning to this house was to ascertain whether any one bearing his name, or answering to my description of him, had arrived ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... after he himself set forth beyond seas, he passed on to young John Milton "in procinct of his travels," his favourite bit of wisdom, learned from a Roman courtier well versed in the ways of Italy: "I pensieri stretti e il viso sciolto."[199] Milton did not follow this Machiavellian precept to keep his "thoughts close and his countenance loose," as Wotton translates it,[200] and was soon marked by the Inquisition; but he was proud of being advised by Sir Henry Wotton, and boasted of the "elegant letter" and "exceedingly useful precepts" which the Provost bestowed ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... arranged for flight; in secret, and saying nothing, in order not to give the alarm to his compromised colleagues, so as, in case of failure, to leave the people some men to devour. For this little school of Machiavellian apes the hopes of a successful escape lie in the abandonment of their friends. During their flight they throw their ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... [Please observe with what Machiavellian astuteness I smuggled in the particular offence which it was my object to hold up to my fellow-boarders, without too personal an attack on the individual at whose door ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... yet graduated in the school of the rights of men, and who must apply themselves to the moral constitution of the heart, would not dare to produce such a triumph as a matter of exultation. There, where men follow their natural impulses, they would not bear the odious maxims of a Machiavellian policy, whether applied to the attainment of monarchical or democratic tyranny. They would reject them on the modern, as they once did on the ancient stage, where they could not bear even the hypothetical proposition of such wickedness in the mouth of a personated tyrant, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... force of his tyranny and despotic will, baffled them both. While Cromwell, the greatest genius in Europe, thought he held all the threads of intrigue in his own hands, his royal master by the dogged pursuit of one end overthrew the minister's entire scheme. Saturated though he was with Machiavellian theories, a man of one book, and that book The Prince, Cromwell lost all by his inability to read the bent of ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... act of accusation against the representative charged with its surveillance, as well as against the six commissioners, and bring them before the Revolutionary Tribunal, whose verdict could not be doubtful."—Buchez et Roux, XXXIII., 431, 436, 441. Speech by Robespierre, Thermidor 8, year II... ". Machiavellian designs against the small fund-holders of the State.. .. A contemptible financial system, wasteful, irritating, devouring, absolutely independent of your supreme oversight.... Anti-revolution exists in the financial ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... that her desire was only to be friendly; brief reflection persuaded Sally that it was to her own interest neither to snub nor to neglect this gratuitous source of information. With some guilty conceit, befitting one indulging in all most Machiavellian subtlety, she let fall an extravagantly absent-minded "Yes?" and was rewarded, quite properly, with a garrulous history of her predecessor's career, from which she disengaged only two profitable impressions: that the staff of servants was devoted to their mistress, and that it ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... for some time one of the "rats" of the Royal Academy of Music, and numbered among her protectors, Lupeaulx. In 1823 her reduced circumstances almost forced her to leave Paris for Issoudun, where, for a machiavellian purpose, Philippe Bridau would have made her the mistress of Jean-Jacques Rouget. The affair did not materialize. She went to Mme. Meynardie's house where she remained till about the end of 1823. One evening, while passing the Porte-Saint-Martin theatre, she chanced to meet ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... of forcing the Manchus to summon Yuan Shih-kai back to office to their rescue on the outbreak of the Wuchang rebellion in 1911. After very little discussion everything was arranged. In the person of this ex-Senator, whose whole appearance was curiously Machiavellian and decadent, the neo-imperialists ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... itself into a reality so quickly as to astound a man too Horatian in his philosophy to be easily surprised. The fish was such a big one to be caught so easily—without any exercise of those subtle manoeuvres and Machiavellian artifices in which the skilful angler delights—nay, to pounce open-eyed upon the hook, and swallow ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Emancipation Act, wrested from Parliament by Christian public opinion in England. Have not means been found to prove, or at least to insinuate, that this act, the most glorious of our century, was at the bottom nothing but a Machiavellian combination of interests? Doubtless, those who have taken the trouble to look over the debates of the times know what we are to think of this fine explanation; they know what resistance was opposed by interests to the emancipation, both in the ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... in the South. The Italian communes freed themselves from all but titular subjection to the Empire, and were practically independent of the Papacy during its exile in Avignon. They succumbed to despots, and from Italian despotism emerged the Machiavellian conception of the State. This conception, modified in various ways, by Sarpi's theory of Church and State, by the Jesuit theory of Papal Supremacy, by the counter-theory of the Divine Right of Kings, by theories ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the motives to aggression will disappear. The new pluralist hopes they will. [Footnote: See G. D. H. Cole, Social Theory, p. 142.] Coercion is the surd in almost all social theory, except the Machiavellian. The temptation to ignore it, because it is absurd, inexpressible, and unmanageable, becomes overwhelming in any man who is trying ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... of our party was then in the custody, and supposedly in the control, of Senator Goodrich of New Jersey. He had a reputation for Machiavellian dexterity, but I found that he was an accident rather than ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... outwitted by the flexible, if not tortuous, policy of Louis Napoleon, it yet remains to be seen whether the firm and unyielding course of the English Ministry will not in the end prove quite as successful as the more Machiavellian management ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Those are found weighty strokes which come from th' hand, But those are killing strokes which come from th' head. Oh, the rare tricks of a Machiavellian! He doth not come, like a gross plodding slave, And buffet you to death; no, my quaint knave, He tickles you to death, makes you die laughing, As if you had swallow'd down a pound of saffron. You see the feat, 'tis practis'd in a trice; ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... Stancy did not return to the castle that night, and he walked through the wood as he had come, feeling that he had been talking with a man of simple nature, who flattered his own understanding by devising Machiavellian theories after the event, to account for any spontaneous action of himself or his daughter, which might otherwise seem ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... from that, upon one hundred dollars a year. She was openly proud of it; her poverty became, in a sense, her riches. "Well, all I have is just one hundred a year," she was fond of saying, "and I don't complain. I don't envy anybody. I have all I want." Her little plans for thrift were fairly Machiavellian; they showed subtly. She told everybody what she had for her meals. She boasted that she lived better than her brother, who was earning good wages in a shoe-factory. She dressed very well, really much better than her sister-in-law. "Poor Eunice never had much management," Maria was wont to say, smoothing ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... shy of parading her happiness; she disliked any demonstrations thereof, even before Johanna. And when Miss Balquidder, who had, of course, been told of the engagement, came down one day expressly to see her "fortunate fellow countryman," this Machiavellian little woman actually persuaded her lover to have an important engagement in London! She could not bear him to ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... ourselves of the effectiveness of such tactics, we tried to imitate them. But these tactics will not fit the German. We are rough but moral, we are credulous but honest." Before this touching picture of the German Innocents very much abroad, the Machiavellian Briton can only take refuge in ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... The Machiavellian policy was Catherine's guide; bitter experience had robbed her of all faith in humanity—she had learned to despise it and the judgment of her contemporaries. At first she was amiable and polite, seemingly intent upon pleasing ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... out a periodical—in MS. it is true—of which the ambitious title was "The Schoolboys' Punch." The ingenuous simplicity with which I am universally credited by all who know me now had not then, I fancy, obtained complete possession of me. I must have been artful, designing, diplomatic, almost Machiavellian; for anxious to curry favour with the head master of my school, I resolved to use the columns of "The Schoolboys' Punch" not so much in the interest of the schoolboy world as to attract the head master's ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Oubacha was most defective. He was much superior in external appearance to his rival on the throne, and so far better qualified to win the good opinion of a semi-barbarous people; whilst his dark intellectual qualities of Machiavelian 5 dissimulation, profound hypocrisy, and perfidy which knew no touch of remorse, were admirably calculated to sustain any ground which he might win from the simple-hearted people with whom he had ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey |
