"Machiavelli" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... note-book has been printed, but it does not show what he thought of the future. That is the problem which the guillotine left unsolved on the evening of June 28, 1794. Only this is certain, that he remains the most hateful character in the forefront of history since Machiavelli reduced to a code the wickedness ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... murmurs. "You get the one treasure. To-morrow I go to the bank, the telegraph, you understand, but not till you have the other money safe." Her eyes sparkle. A double fortune! A double revenge! A veritable "coup de Machiavelli." ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... of Mr. Macaulay's collected articles, we were especially offended by his curious and undesirable Essay on Machiavelli. Declining the various solutions which have been offered to explain how a man supposed to be so great could have lent his genius to the doctrine of "the Prince," he has advanced a hypothesis of his own, which may or may not be true, as an interpretation of Machiavelli's character, but ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... parish church of Warfield, Berkshire. By his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Staverton of Warfield, he had no issue.{2} In his retirement he found occupation in political theory. He translated some of the writings of Machiavelli, which he had obtained in Italy in 1645, and published ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... letters. On what our Elizabethan literature owes to the Classical revival hundreds of volumes have been written and hundreds more will be written; I will but remind you of what Spencer talked about with Gabriel Harvey, what Daniel disputed with Campion; that Marlowe tried to re-incarnate Machiavelli, that Jonson was a sworn Latinist and the 'tribe of Ben' a classical tribe; while, as for Shakespeare, go and reckon the proportion of Italian and Roman names in his dramatis personae. Of Donne's debt to France, Italy, Rome, Greece, you may read much in Professor Grierson's great ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the respect, of those about him in such a marked degree that those who have served him once would go far to serve him again. Sir T. Shepstone, however, has enemies like other people, and is commonly reported among them to be a disciple of Machiavelli, and to have his mind steeped in all the darker wiles of Kafir policy. The Annexation of the Transvaal is by them attributed to a successful and vigorous use of those arts that distinguished the diplomacy of two centuries ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... use of arguing with anybody that can believe in Machiavel?" asks mankind, or might well ask; and, except for Editorial purposes, eschews any ANTI-MACHIAVEL; impatient to be rid of bane and antidote both. Truly the world has had a pother with this little Nicolo Machiavelli and his perverse little Book:—pity almost that a Friedrich Wilhelm, taking his rounds at that point of time, had not had the "refuting" of him; Friedrich Wilhelm's method would have been briefer than Friedrich's! But let us hope the thing is now, practically, about completed. And ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... struggle between Pitt and Napoleon, two men who conducted the politics of their respective countries at an age when Henri de Navarre, Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert, Louvois, the Prince of Orange, the Guises, Machiavelli, in short, all the best known of our great men, coming from the ranks or born to a throne, began to rule the State. The Convention—that model of energy—was made up in a great measure of young heads; no sovereign ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... impetuous, and brilliant flow of Motley's thought. Neither leans to the ideal; with both the actual prevails. The policy of a government is summoned by neither before the partial tribunal of a sentiment, or the intricate scheme of some Machiavelli subjected to the imperfect analysis of a headstrong imagination. But Gibbon, though he writes in the vernacular, has lost all the honest nationality that should give an air of sincerity to his work; his brilliant antithesis ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... rules for social and public success with such unapproachable astuteness that his name has become a synonym for unerring policy, Machiavelli passed his existence in obedience and submission to Rome, to Florence, to Charles, to Cosmo, to ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... pithy chapter in Machiavelli's Prince which treats of cruelty and clemency, and whether it be better to be loved or feared, anticipates the defence of the Terrorists, in the maxim that for a new prince it is impossible to avoid the name of cruel, because all new states ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... Machiavelli was born at Florence, in Italy, May 3, 1469, and died June 22, 1527. At any early age he took an active part in Florentine politics, and was employed on numerous diplomatic missions. A keen student of the politics of his time, he was also an ardent patriot. The exigencies of party warfare ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... pen was with her, as with Margaret Fuller, a non-conductor; but as a choice spirit, of the most beautiful and engaging qualities of companionship, "Isa," as she was always caressingly called, is still held in memory. Madame Pasquale Villari, the wife of the great historian and the biographer of Machiavelli and of Savonarola, well remembers Miss Blagden, who died, indeed, in her arms in ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... Knights of Suabia and the Rhineland maintained the predatory traditions of the Dark Ages; and everywhere feudalism remained a force inimical to national unity. But the great feudatories who survived into the age of Machiavelli and of the new despotisms had usually some claims upon the respect of their subjects. The Duchy of Brittany, the Burgundian inheritance, the German electorates, were mainly objectionable as impeding ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... the subjective, rather than in the objective side of life. It is from within out that they are stirred, not as we are, by outside things working upon us. They are still the dreaming, drinking, singing, impulsive Germans of Tacitus. Titus Livius, Plutarch, and Machiavelli, all maintained that the successive invasions of the Germans into Italy were for the sake of the wine to be found there. Plutarch writes that "the Gauls were introduced to the Italian wine by a Tuscan named Arron, and so excited were they by the desire for more that, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... not the presence of mind to escort his visitor to the door or ring for attendance. He remained standing, staring after her. His gaze shifted to the table, where, either by accident or design, the photographs remained, scattered. He chuckled grimly. Accident! Nothing was accidental with that Machiavelli in petticoats. She knew he would read those accursed lines, and realize with every sentence that in truth she was "letting him down easy." There was no danger of his backing out of his bargain. Seated at the desk, he perused his folly, ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... always are in a world which ought to be left entirely to old people, and I could not see that they did any harm. But somebody must have done harm, for not only was a bust here and there scribbled over in pencil, but the bust of Machiavelli had its nose freshly broken off in a jagged fracture that was very hurting to look at. This may have been done by some mistaken moralist, who saw in the old republican adviser of princes that enemy of mankind ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... when Madam was taking her rest, Miss Isobel, feeling like Machiavelli one moment and Florence Nightingale the next, stepped into the carriage, already loaded with delicacies, and proceeded on her errand of mercy. She invariably returned in a twitter of subdued excitement, and recounted her experiences with breathless ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... are as vain as ever! Let us say, then, of grand larceny. In any event, the politician was dismissed. And what, my dears, do you suppose this bold and bad and unprincipled Machiavelli went and did? Why, he made straight for the father of the princess the usurping duke was going to marry, and surprised everybody by showing that, at a pinch, even this Guy Fawkes—who was stuffed with all manner of guile and wickedness where ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... autocracy is the ideal government, my friend—the ideal of all supreme thinkers—a Machiavelli, a Nietzsche, a Stendhal, a Gobineau. Liberty and equality are terms mutually destructive, they cannot exist together; for, given liberty, the strong instantly look to it that equality shall perish. And rightly so. Equality is a war cry for fools—a negation of nature, an abortion. The very ants ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... where Gianpaolo paid homage and supplied his haughty guest with soldiers. The rashness of this act of Julius sent a thrill of admiration throughout Italy, stirring that sense of terribilita which fascinated the imagination of the Renaissance. Machiavelli, commenting upon the action of the Baglioni, remarks that the event proved how difficult it is for a man to be perfectly and scientifically wicked. Gianpaolo, he says, murdered his relations, oppressed ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... One of these is invention. New weapons and new methods have become available, and have modified tactics, strategy, the relative advantage of offensive and defensive. The other chief factor in the evolution of the war has been social organisation. As Machiavelli points out in his Art of War, there was insufficient social stability in Europe to keep a properly trained and disciplined infantry in the field from the passing of the Roman legions to the appearance of the Swiss footmen. He makes it very clear that he considers the fighting of the Middle ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... period when ancient ways were giving place to modern, and a transition was taking place in the realm of ideas, Thomas More, in his Utopia, and Campanella in his City of the Sun, published their conceptions of an ideal state, while Machiavelli took society as it was, and in his Prince suggested how it might be governed better. These are all evidences that there was dissatisfaction with existing systems, but no unanimity of opinion as to possible ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... heart is wrung by the loss of two dear friends. The man must pay for the happiness of the king. But," said the king, after a pause, "this is the dealing of the Almighty; I must submit silently. Would that my heart were silent! I will tell you something, my friend. I fear that I was unjust to Machiavelli. He was right—only a man with a heart of iron can be a king, for he alone could ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... careful of Peter's patrimony than of Peter's creed, went with France to the Protestant side. With the princes, as usual, political motives were the strongest, with the people religious motives. The politics were to a sad extent those of Machiavelli and the Jesuit; but above the meaner characters who crowd the scene rise ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... Baines and Undershaft] You shall carry the flag down the first street, Mrs Baines [he gives her the flag]. Mr Undershaft is a gifted trombonist: he shall intone an Olympian diapason to the West Ham Salvation March. [Aside to Undershaft, as he forces the trombone on him] Blow, Machiavelli, blow. ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... suffered, sat on tenscore of camp-stools puffing the smoke of twenty-five score of free cigars into their faces, and gloating over their misery, was extremely successful, and had gained for me among my professional brethren the enviable title of "Machiavelli Junior." This performance, in fact, was the one now uppermost in the minds of the club members, having been the most recent of the series; and it had been prophesied by many men whose judgment was unassailable that no man, ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... mind to anything. In fact, he knew very little Italian, most of the authors in his collection were strange to him, and at the age of twenty-two he had read nothing whatever of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Boccaccio, or Machiavelli. ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... perhaps a little too much in playing Machiavelli, and in exalting abstention to a system. Their fondest desire at the present moment is not, we are persuaded, to march on Austria, but, on the contrary, not to march at all, and not to intervene in the war up to the day of the ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... crisis is one in which the nation needs statesmanship and a broad outlook upon the world. In the existing situation we need not the duplicity of a Machiavelli, but the commanding prescience of a Gladstone or an Alfred the Great, or a Julius Caesar. Luckily we have exactly this type of man at the ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... dramatist. The diabolic part of the tragicomic business is distinctly inferior to the parallel or similar scenes in the much older play of "Grim the Collier of Croydon," which is perhaps more likely to have been the writer's immediate model than the original story by Machiavelli. The two remaining plays now extant which bear the single name of Dekker give no sign of his highest powers, but are tolerable examples of journeyman's work in the field of romantic or fanciful comedy. "Match ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... interesting. Among the best of the literary essays are those on Bunyan, Addison, Bacon, Johnson, Goldsmith and Byron; among the historical essays one may sample Macaulay's variety in Lord Clive, Frederick the Great, Machiavelli and Mirabeau. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... effectual motive is supplied by the feeling that next to the merit of doing something oneself, comes that of correctly appreciating and recognizing what others have done. This accords with the threefold division of heads drawn up by Hesiod[1] and afterwards by Machiavelli[2] There are, says the latter, in the capacities of mankind, three varieties: one man will understand a thing by himself; another so far as it is explained to him; a third, neither of himself nor when it is put clearly ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... century, were inspired as much by hatred of religion, or by what is called love of freedom, as by enthusiasm for art. Hitherto the Renaissance had taken little notice of music. It was a barbarian art; how could Florentine exquisites, disciples of Machiavelli, men of the vein of Lorenzo di Medici, Leo X., and Baldassari Castiglione be expected to occupy themselves with the art of men bearing such names as Okeghem or Obrecht? Popes and Cardinals, however, had shown themselves ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... politician must have been a perfect Machiavelli. His favourite saying was doubtless 'A plague on both your houses,' and with equal certainty his favourite quotation the bardic 'Whether Roderigo kill Cassio, or Cassio kill Roderigo, or each kill the other, every way makes my gain.' His theory of Nationalist ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... have no regard but for his own interest; neither to love nor put trust in any one; and not to promote the views or advantage of either brother or sister. These and other maxims of the like nature, drawn from tho school of Machiavelli, he was continually suggesting to him. He had so frequently inculcated them that they were strongly impressed on his mind, insomuch that, upon our arrival, when, after the first compliments, my mother ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... American State, the disguises that Machine wore, its absolute unscrupulousness, its wickedness, its purpose to destroy the ideals of democracy. And Roosevelt's analysis of Platt may stand alongside of Machiavelli's portraits of the Italian Bosses four hundred years before—they were ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... what does it matter? The worst that can happen to you for breaking bounds is a couple of hundred lines, and I've got a capital of four hundred already in stock. Besides, things would be so slow if you always kept in bounds. I always feel like a cross between Dick Turpin and Machiavelli when I go to Stapleton. It's an awfully jolly feeling. Like warm treacle running down your back. It's cheap at ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... [64] So Machiavelli, in his complete poem, "Dell' Asino d'Oro," makes the Hog, who is maintaining the superiority of the brute creation to man, say of ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... loose on society again you never dream that you meet anything but becomingly dressed 'policy;' and fashionable 'diplomacy' has hunted 'insincerity'—that other horrid remnant of old-fogyism—as far away from civilization as are the lava beds of the Modocs. If ghosts have risible faculties, how Machiavelli must laugh, watching us from the Elysian Fields! Sometimes silence ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... tells us of republics in India, still supposed to exist by modern investigators; but they are not more productive of liberty of thought, or ferment of intellect, than the principalities. In Italy there were commonwealths as liberal as the Republic of Florence; but they did not produce a Machiavelli or a Dante. What daring thought, what gigantic speculation, what democracy of wisdom and genius, have sprung up amongst the despotisms of Germany! You cannot educate two individuals so as to produce the same results from both; you cannot, by similar constitutions (which are the ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... highest and could best appreciate, would be quite inexplicable. But William had another and still more important point of contact with Philip II. He had learned his policy from the same master, and had become, it was to be feared, a more apt scholar. Not by making Machiavelli's 'Prince' his study, but by having enjoyed the living instruction of a monarch who reduced the book to practice, had he become versed in the perilous arts by which thrones rise and fall. In him Philip had to deal with an antagonist who was armed against his policy, and who in a good cause ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... inseparable companions, although he did not make much use of them for two or three years. However, he now learned to know at least something of the six great luminaries, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... think yourself very wise, Crow, and so you are," Lady Anningford retorted severely, "but you don't know anything about love. When a man is in love, even if he were Machiavelli himself, it would be bound to show in his ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... All institutions (says Machiavelli) must return to their origins, or they fail. There appeared throughout Europe in the last century of united Europe, breaking out here and there, sporadic attempts to revivify the common life, especially upon its spiritual side, by a return to the primitive ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... as Luther had taught and written there shortly before, and the very name must have immediately suggested the idea of freedom in thinking. I cannot even consider it an anachronism that Richard the Third should speak of Machiavelli. The word is here used altogether proverbially the contents, at least, of the book entitled Of the Prince (Del Principe) have been in existence ever since the existence of tyrants; Machiavelli was merely the first to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to become his partner, or not busied with affairs of his patron, or not keenly observant of the methods of the poor whites whom he hired to tend his tobacco, he read. He read history: Clarendon, Gibbon, and Hume; Aristotle, Bacon, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, Rousseau, and Tom Paine. His Ossian, Caesar, and Plutarch belonged to his younger days. A translation of the Divina Commedia fell into his hands, and once he chanced to take up, and then read with ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... of Brampton. Written under such trying circumstances, with I know not how many erasures and false starts, it is little short of a marvel in art: neither too much said, nor too little, for a relenting parent of Mr. Worthington's character, and I doubt whether Talleyrand or Napoleon or even Machiavelli himself could have surpassed it. The second letter, now that Mr. Worthington had got into the swing, was more easily written. "My dear Robert" (it said), "I have made up my mind to give my consent to your marriage ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... war never expecting that we would participate in it. By accident Grey blundered into a marvellous stroke of diplomacy. Of course, we know that all his actions were governed by an honest desire to preserve peace, but the facts show that he really deceived the Germans more than Machiavelli would have done. (The Prussian, in the average, is very prone to misunderstand his enemy.) The Germans thought we would not come in; we did come in, just when they were not expecting it; in effect, that was a master-stroke. Where we failed was that we were not ourselves ready with ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... rose in his shield. Here I wish only to remind the reader who wanders among the ruins of his great castle, that Castracani took Sarzana by force and held it against any; and perhaps to recall the words of Machiavelli, where he tells us that the capture of Sarzana was a feat of daring done to impress the Lucchesi with the splendour of their liberated tyrant. For when the citizens had freed him from the prison of ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... of Machiavelli and Metternich, Bismarck and Beaconsfield could be taken as a basis of politics, whereas Christ's mentality could not, is the conception even of many theologians. Yet Christ survives all these politicians ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... canons and spiritual men, it grew to be far worse. For they also, within a while waxing covetous, by their own experience learned aforehand, raised the markets, and sought after new gains by the gifts of the greatest livings in that country, wherein (as Machiavelli writeth) are eighteen archbishoprics, one hundred forty and five bishoprics, 740 abbeys, eleven universities, 1,000,700 steeples (if his report be sound). Some are of the opinion that, if sufficient men in every town might be sent for from the universities, this mischief would soon be ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... Diderot and Voltaire, and still more willingly among the Roman comedy-writers—Lessing loved also free-spiritism in the TEMPO, and flight out of Germany. But how could the German language, even in the prose of Lessing, imitate the TEMPO of Machiavelli, who in his "Principe" makes us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence, and cannot help presenting the most serious events in a boisterous allegrissimo, perhaps not without a malicious artistic ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Destitute of political morality. A term derived from the name of Niccolo Machiavelli, an Italian statesman and writer (1469-1527), who, in a treatise on government entitled "The Prince," advocated, or was interpreted to advocate, the disregard of moral principle in the maintenance of ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... of good intelligence and discretion could have got the same results as Goodrich's. He was simply a lackey, strutting and cutting a figure in his master's clothes and under his master's name. He was pitifully vain of his reputation as a Machiavelli and a go-between. Vanity is sometimes a source of great strength; but vanity of that sort, and about a position in which secrecy is the prime requisite, ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... father of the new one was a great gormandizer of Pantagruelian dimensions. He died of overloading his stomach. The son made his career like a cautious upstart. He is well enough acquainted with himself to know that he is not a Machiavelli. Therefore, he does not boast of his sagacity, but rather of his integrity. A politician is irresistible to a crowd when he cries out to them: "My opponents express the suspicion that I am a numskull. I do not care to argue the point with them, but this I will say by the way of explanation, fellow ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... little woman! how I longed to comfort her, by giving her a glimpse behind the scenes! but it would have entailed certain ruin; she would have made confusion worse confounded of the best laid scheme that Machiavelli ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... a Machiavelli, who has looked behind the screen of political hypocrisies; the knowledge of which the essence is distilled in Bacon's 'Essays;' or the knowledge of which Polonius seems to have retained many shrewd scraps even when he had fallen into his dotage. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... vii., p. 356.).—Your correspondent BOOKWORM will find in any chronology a very satisfactory reason why Machiavelli could not reply to the summons of Benedict XIV., unless, indeed, the Pope had made use of "the power of the keys," to call him up for a brief space to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... nature; General Rukavina was despicable, said these documents, he was an absolute nonentity; but no, shrieked von Thurn on the next day, this man Rukavina was imbued as no other with the abominable spirit of Machiavelli. To bring about the fall of the Hungarian party in Dalmatia, Count Raymond's police set themselves the task of laying by the heels such Hungarian agents as Count Miaslas Zanovi['c], one of the four sons of Count Anthony, who for being implicated in a ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... doubt the truth of this. I knew Mr. Schnadhorst well, and had a great respect for him as a man at once honest, sagacious, and of much simplicity of character. But he was not intellectually great, nor was he the astute and unscrupulous Machiavelli his opponents believed him to be. The Birmingham caucus, which became a model for all other Liberal constituencies, was probably founded by the joint efforts of several men, among whom Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Powell Williams, ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... Classical and Romantic grew out of nothing more than an attempt of the modern spirit to free itself from laws of taste laid down by the Grand Siecle. But we must not forget the debt which all modern prose literature owes to France. It is true that Machiavelli was the first to write with classic pith and point in a living language; but he is, for all that, properly an ancient. Montaigne is really the first modern writer,—the first who assimilated his Greek and Latin, and showed that an ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... another subject (for I have a pleasure in talking over every subject with you): How deep are you in Italian? Do you understand Ariosto, Tasso, Boccaccio and Machiavelli? If you do, you know enough of it and may know all the rest, by reading, when you have time. Little or no business is written in Italian, except in Italy; and if you know enough of it to understand the few Italian letters that may in time come in your way, and to speak Italian tolerably ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the founder of the Dominican order, a descendant of the noble family of the Guzmans? Machiavelli wrote a treatise to prove it; but in the Biographie Universelle it is stated (I know not on what authority) that Cardinal Lambertini, afterwards Benedict XIV., having summoned that lawyer to produce the originals, Machiavelli deferred, and refused ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various
... possible to institute fair comparisons. Education is the discoverer of ability and without the opportunity it gives genius will languish and die unknown, as said that acute observer of human nature, Machiavelli, in speaking about the leaders of antiquity, "Without opportunity their powers of mind would have been extinguished and without those powers the opportunity would have come ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... dwell with fervour on the advantage he possesses in not being a priest. If he is accused of possessing inordinate wealth, these indulgent Christians reply, that he is not a priest! If you charge him with having read Machiavelli to good purpose; admitted—what then?—he is no priest! If the tongue of scandal is over-free with his private life; still the ready reply, that he is not a priest! If Deacons are thus privileged, what latitude may we ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... will take good care not to do, madam; for they would be mad to do it when they keep you here in this isolated castle, in the care of your enemies, having no witness but God, who avenges crime, but who does not prevent it. Recollect, madam, what Machiavelli has said, 'A king's tomb is never far from his prison.' You come of a family in which one dies young, madam, and almost always of a sudden death: two of your ancestors perished by ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... that he included even England—a rare thing in those days—and after serving as Burgomaster in his native place, died in 1602. His writings, other than De Peregrinatione, are three translations from Machiavelli.[40] ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... Machiavelli's "Prince," which must come to the mind of every one who reads the "Farewell Address," one sees at once that the "Prince" is more limber, it may be more spontaneous, but the great difference between the two is in their fundamental conception. The "Address" ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... Supreme Court, and McCunn of the Superior Court. Their offences extended beyond the sphere of Tweed's operations, indicating the greed of a Sweeny and the disregard of all honorable obligations. Cardozo, the most infamous of the trio, called the Machiavelli of the Bench, weakened under investigation and resigned to avoid dismissal. Barnard and McCunn, being summarily removed, were forever disqualified from holding any office of trust in the State. McCunn ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Pigna, who was the secretary and favourite of the reigning duke. The Princess Leonora tried to cure Tasso of this passion by persuading him to illustrate the verses of his rival Pigna. Nothing came of this first love, therefore, and the object of it soon after married into the house of Machiavelli. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... thinking that he gave it to the republic; but now he was able neither to praise nor to keep silent; his energetic activity, which he had employed for the republic, he now directed against those who were ruining it by bloodshed. In his Vieux Cordelier he spoke of liberty with the depth of Machiavelli, and of men with the wit of Voltaire. But he soon raised the fanatics and dictators against him, by calling the government to sentiments of moderation, compassion, ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... psychological studies and for the light that it throws on those principles of cunning statecraft which permeated the politics and diplomacy of the age and were to receive their final exposition in the Prince of Machiavelli. In his calm, judicious, unaffected pages we can trace the first beginnings of that strange movement which was to convert the old Europe of the Middle Ages, with its universal Empire and its universal Church, into the new Europe of independent ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... preceding ages, except those of Pericles and Augustus: beginning in the fourteenth Century with Dante and Petrarch, and ending at the beginning of the sixteenth with the father of the modern political system, Machiavelli, it rose to the highest point of its altitude, and remained there through the whole of the fifteenth, when such bright lights shone constantly in the meridian of mind, as that Prince of the Church, Cardinal Sadoleti, great as a poet, equally great as a philosopher, whose poems ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... said, "'Jones' lacks imagination. It's the sort of name you give when you're arrested for exceeding the speed limit. Why don't you call yourself Machiavelli?" ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... hostage however precious, inspires a hundredth part of the confidence which is produced by the 'yea, yea,' and the 'nay, nay,' of a British envoy." Therefore it is that Lord Macaulay is sure that "looking at the question of expediency in the lowest sense of the word, and using no arguments but such as Machiavelli might have employed in his conferences with Borgia, we are convinced that Clive was altogether in the wrong, and that he committed, not merely a ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... in peace. That was the secret vow, the aim of even the most energetic of those who controlled politics. A little Machiavelli, master of himself and others, with a heart as cold as his head, a lucid, bored intelligence, knowing how and daring to use all means to gain his ends, ready to sacrifice all his friends to his ambition, would be capable of sacrificing his ambition to one thing only: ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... heresy. Matteo Palmieri is said to have dragged Botticelli with him into dark corners of disbelief; there was in the Medicean days a cruel order of intelligence that delighted to toy with the vital faith and ideals of the young. It was more savage and cunning when Machiavelli, shrewdest of men, wrote and lived. A nature like Botticelli's, which surrendered frankly to ideas if they but wore the mask of subtlety, could not fail to have been swept away in the eddying cross-currents of Florentine ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... of little fields. I do not deny that this is soothing and restful; but I feel it—shall I confess—intolerably cooping. I long for the searching light, the wide prospect; for the vision of things as they really are. I have consorted too long with Aristotle and Machiavelli to find myself at home in the country of the Anglican Church and of Herbert Spencer." Here he paused, and seemed to hesitate, while we wondered what he could be leading up to. Then, resuming, "This may seem," he went on, "a long introduction; but it is not irrelevant; though I feel some hesitation ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... Machiavelli, commenting on the books of Livy, lays it down as a general truth that every form and reform has been brought about by a single individual. Since a remorseless criticism has shorn so many heroes of their laurels, our faith in the maxim of the great Florentine ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... the least suspecting that I was the young man who, so long before, had come to him from Mill. He looked with amazement at books in which he had written with his own hand, and at old letters from himself which I produced. I visited him again in 1898. His books on Machiavelli and Savonarola entitle him to rank among the foremost students and ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... had readers ever since they were first printed. The little book of Antoninus has been the companion of some great men. Machiavelli's Art of War and Marcus Antoninus were the two books which were used when he was a young man by Captain John Smith, and he could not have found two writers better fitted to form the character of a soldier ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... shining ladder, on which the prophets of mind rise to heaven, like Elias of old. In the right aisle of the church every statue on the richly carved sarcophagi seemed endowed with life. Here stood Michael Angelo; there Dante, with the laurel wreath round his brow; Alfieri and Machiavelli; for here side by side rest the great men—the pride of Italy. The church itself is very beautiful, even more beautiful than the marble cathedral at Florence, though not so large. It seemed as if the carved vestments stirred, and as if the marble figures ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... conceded; "but, 'Seek whom the crime profits,' says Machiavelli. What profit would it be to such a scoundrel to do you an ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... support of this amazing statement she quotes some wandering phrase of Sainte-Beuve. By the light of recent revelations, whether Sainte-Beuve was ironical or not, he was certainly perfidious. But, to waive that matter, does Mrs. Humphry Ward consider that Swift and Lucian and Machiavelli were, as she puts it, "doomed to failure" because they used irony as a weapon? Was Heine and is Anatole France conspicuous for want of intelligence? And, after all, ought not Mrs. Ward to remember that if she had a very serious grandfather, she had a still more celebrated ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... him. Except in extremity, they would hardly murder him out of hand, and yet to explain to him why they had treated him so hardly, would be a delicate matter. But the answer lay in the operator's total freedom from suspicion that his captive had read the wire. So far as that backwoods Machiavelli divined, there was no link establishing himself with the conspiracy to rob, and when the time came he thought he could clear his skirts ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... Was the man a trickster, it must be more for the love than the lucre. Two or three dirty dollars the motive to so many nice wiles? And yet how full of mean needs his seeming. Before his mental vision the person of that threadbare Talleyrand, that impoverished Machiavelli, that seedy Rosicrucian—for something of all these he vaguely deems him—passes now in puzzled review. Fain, in his disfavor, would he make out a logical case. The doctrine of analogies recurs. Fallacious enough doctrine ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... is shortsighted," he said; "the salvation of the Church must come from the Italian republic, as Leo XIII believes and wishes; but the Church will not be saved in the manner which this pious Machiavelli thinks. The revolution will make the Pope lose his last sou, with the rest of his patrimony. And it will be salvation. The Pope, destitute and poor, will then become powerful. He will agitate the world. We shall see again Peter, Lin, Clet, Anaclet, and Clement; the humble, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... with the wrong side of genius, and Camille Maupin's desire to put him back on the right side is easily conceivable. The task was an attractive one. Claude Vignon thinks himself a great politician as well as a great writer; but this unpublished Machiavelli laughs within himself at all ambitions; he knows what he can do; he has instinctively taken the measure of his future on his faculties; he sees his greatness, but he also sees obstacles, grows alarmed or disgusted, lets the time roll by, and does not go to work. Like Etienne Lousteau the feuilletonist, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... was in their days yet in its infancy. The world had long ceased to be ingenuous, but nations had not yet learned civilised methods of guarding themselves against their enemies. At a time when distrust was general, it was easier, like Machiavelli, to erect deceit and fraud into a science, and to teach the vile utility of lying, than to scrutinise character and weigh motives. It was then generally understood that opponents might legitimately be hoodwinked to the limits of their gullibility; but it was reserved ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... Machiavel. Nicolo Machiavelli (1468-1527), a Florentine statesman, whose name had an odious association because of the supposedly diabolical policy of government set forth in his "Prince." But this work was not translated till 1640. His "Art of War" had ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... leathery, muscular forearms showing below the rolled shirt-sleeves. His years had ground him to an edge; he had an effect, as he lay, of fineness, of subtlety, of keen and fastidious temper. Forty years of subjection to arbitrary masters had left him shrewd and secret, a Machiavelli of the forecastle. ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... I'm down below ill. Say you think I'm dying," responded the infant Machiavelli, "then you'll see somethink if you keep ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... voteless. How often in his prison he must have yearned for those old Landtag days—apart from his advocacy of the peasants, he loves to speak. In two hours he would traverse the whole gamut of human thought, expressing opinions to which John Hampden and Jack Cade and Montaigne and Machiavelli would in turn assent. The words used to rush from his lips in a torrent, while to many of his faithful peasant followers he seemed, throughout his discourse, to be in direct contact with the Almighty. Next to the Almighty the Croatian ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... argument, he said: 'Want of money will not cause Russia to terminate the war. Machiavelli has truly said that nothing is more false than the common belief that money is the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... thousands of men, women, and children, marking his bloody route by pyramids of skulls. The unbaptized child, who goes to hell because of the original sin derived from Adam, is exposed to God's wrath no less than Pope Alexander VI, who outraged every law of God and man, and who, says Machiavelli, "was followed to the tomb by the holy feet of his three dear companions—Luxury, Simony, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... of Mount Fiesole. Outspread view of Florence (Duomo, Giotto's Tower, etc.) as seen from that eminence.—NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, asleep on grass, wakes as sun rises. Deplores his exile from Florence, LORENZO'S unappeasable hostility, etc. Wonders if he could not somehow secure the POPE'S favour. Very cynical. Breaks off: But who are these that scale the mountain-side? | Savonarola and Lucrezia | Borgia!—Enter through a trap-door, ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... Notizie Intorno Rafaele Sanzio da Urbino, and others. Ranke worked with these authorities when he wrote his History of the Popes. What about the authorities which Gieseler cites in his Ecclesiastical History— Muratori, Fabronius, Machiavelli, Sabellicus, Raynaldus, Eccardus, Burchardus, etc.? A compassionate age has relegated the exact account of the moral state of the papacy in Luther's days to learned works, and even in these they are given mostly in Latin footnotes. In the language of Augustus Birrell, ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... original political philosopher who had arisen since Machiavelli, and he devoted all his learning and acuteness to crushing the rising scepticism on the subject of witches. The truth is that in those ages ability was no guarantee against error; for the single employment of the reason was to develop and expand premises that were furnished ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... great deal of nonsense has been written by Carlyle. The fact is that Cromwell, in these matters, acted as Cortez did in Mexico, and Pizarro in Peru, and deserves no more charity. If he performed them from policy, as Carlyle intimates, he must be considered a disciple of Machiavelli and the Devil; if he performed them from religious bigotry, he may rank with St. Dominic and Charles the Ninth. We are sick of hearing brutality and wickedness, either in Puritan or Catholic, extenuated on ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... of the greatest, perhaps the very greatest, of the political philosophers of the present day. Alone of all his contemporaries, his best works will bear a comparison with those of Machiavelli and Bacon. Less caustic and condensed than Tacitus, less imaginative and eloquent than Burke, he possesses the calm judgment, the discriminating eye, and the just reflection, which have immortalised the Florentine statesman and the English philosopher. Born and bred in the midst of the vehement ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Parker's rubber schemes, which he hadn't divulged even to his partners in business. It was a deep and carefully planned plot, and some of the conspirators were pretty deeply in the mire, I guess. I wish I'd had all the facts about who this red-haired female Machiavelli was—what a piece of muckraking it would have made! Oh, here comes the rest of the news story over the wire. By Jove, it is said on good authority that Bruce will be taken in as one of the board of directors. What ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... for in so far as these are bestowed "by the grace of God," altar and throne are closely related. Accordingly, every wise prince who loves his throne and his family will walk before his people as a type of true religion; just as even Machiavelli, in the eighteenth chapter of his book, urgently recommended religion to princes. Moreover, it may be added that revealed religions are related to philosophy, exactly as the sovereigns by the grace of God are to the sovereignty ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... ecclesiastical history. The early part of Creighton's book on the "History of the Papacy During the Reformation Period" had especially interested me, and I now enjoyed greatly his knowledge of Italian matters. He discussed Tomasini's book on Machiavelli, and sundry new Italian books on the relations of the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... Latin poet, was once a miller's lad. Machiavelli wrote The Prince at night, and by day was a common working-man like any one else; and more than all, the great Cervantes, who lost an arm at the battle of Lepanto, and helped to win that famous day, was called ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... Machiavelli quotes a proverb, "War makes thieves and peace has them hanged" The Spaniards in Mexico, which has been in rebellion for forty years, are more or less thieves. They want to continue to ply the trade. Civil authority ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... CENTURY.—Italy, after Dante and Petrarch, possessed literary strength and much literary glory in the sixteenth century. She produced an admirable pleiad of poets and prose writers of high merit. These were Ariosto, Tasso, Berni, Sannazaro, Machiavelli, Bandello, Guicciardini. Below them were a hundred distinguished writers, among which must be cited Aretino, Folengo, Bembo, Baldi, Tansillo, Dolce, Benvenuto ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... Portato fu fra l'anime beate Lo spirito di Alessandro glorioso; Del qual seguiro le sante pedate Tre sue familiari e care ancelle, Lussuria, Simonia, e Crudeltate. [—Machiavelli, Decennale Primo.]] ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... referred to as a "school for gentlemen." When the world is a little bit civilized, men will read them as they now read Machiavelli's Prince. ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... Machiavelli: Nicolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) Political philosopher, author of The Prince, that focuses on problems of a monarch, the foundation of political authority and how to retain power, rather ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... a bronze statue by Donatello on the public square in Padua, was of this breed. Like this were the Trinci and their bands of murderers. Like this were the bravi who hunted Lorenzaccio to death at Venice. Like this was Pietro Paolo Baglioni, whose fault, in the eyes of Machiavelli, was that he could not succeed in being "perfettamente tristo." Beautiful, but inhuman; passionate, but cold; powerful, but rendered impotent for firm and lofty deeds by immorality and treason; how many centuries of men like this once wasted Italy and ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... it was, gave the Duchess the right to decide in the affirmative on her own responsibility; yet fictions like these formed a part of the "dissimulation," which was accounted profound statesmanship by the disciples of Machiavelli. The Prince, however irritated, maintained his steadiness; assured the Regent that the negotiation had advanced too far to be abandoned, and repeated his assurance that the future Princess of Orange was to "live as ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... off his hat, with great formality, "if ever again I find myself in a dilemma, I will come to you instead of to Machiavelli." ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... she knew—and she was expert in making or claiming acquaintance—she expanded upon the impudence of a young nobody named Smith who was making up to Cecily Wayne, doubtless with a hope of capturing her prospective millions. Among others, she approached Judge Enderby, and that dry old Machiavelli congratulated her upon her altruistic endeavors to keep the social strain of the ship pure and undefiled, promising his help. He it was who suggested her ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... word, M'Iver," said Argile, "you beat me at my own trade of debate, and—have you ever heard of a fellow Machiavelli?" ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... correspondent are from Peacock's "Headlong Hall," and are imitated from Machiavelli's "Capitolo dell' Occasione." The whole air stands thus; the second stanza differing slightly from the version given by MR. BURT. The lines are very pretty, at least ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... up from a Universal Classics Library edition, published in 1901 by W. Walter Dunne, New York and London. The translator was not named. The book contains a "photogravure" of Niccolo Machiavelli ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... that he exclaimed, "You must be godfather to all my children!" The wealth and luxury displayed by the duke and duchess when they visited Florence two years later with a suite of two thousand persons, scandalized the old-fashioned citizens, and, in Machiavelli's opinion, proved the beginning of a marked degeneracy in ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... question, big with two hundred thousand francs, Adeline forgot the odious insults heaped on her by this cheap-jack fine gentleman, before the tempting picture of success described by Machiavelli-Crevel, who only wanted to find out her secrets and laugh over them ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Macaulay, Lord, Machiavelli, Maidston, John: character of Cromwell, Manchester, Edward Montagu, second Earl of, Baron Montagu of Kimbolton, Viscount Mandeville: character by Clarendon, by Warwick, by Burnet, Manchester, Henry Montagu, ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... assassins more fiendishly malignant in spirit than they actually were. Thus Ferdinand, in "The Duchess of Malfy," is the conception formed by an honest, deep-thoughted Englishman of an Italian duke and politician, who had been educated in those maxims of policy which were generalized by Machiavelli. Webster makes him a devil, but a devil with a soul to be damned. The Duchess, his sister, is discovered to be secretly married to her steward; and in connection with his brother, the Cardinal, the Duke not only resolves ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... publication of the esoteric wisdom of the sex, and even against the acknowledgment that any such body of erudition exists at all. Men, having more vanity and less discretion, area good deal less cautious. There is, in fact, a whole literature of masculine babbling, ranging from Machiavelli's appalling confession of political theory to the egoistic confidences of such men as Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Casanova, Max Stirner, Benvenuto Cellini, Napoleon Bonaparte and Lord Chesterfield. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... but not of theories—for Rome constructed the most solid state known to history with extraordinary statesmanship but with hardly any political writings—influenced considerably the founder of modern political science, Nicolo Machiavelli, who was himself in truth not a creator of doctrines but a keen observer of human nature who derived from the study of history practical maxims of political import. He freed the science of politics from the formalism of the ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various |
