"Machiavelli" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... less given to war than their forefathers, they were now compelled to study the politician's part, even more than the soldier's. Brought personally in contact with powerful Sovereigns, or pitted at home against the Sydneys, Mountjoys, Chichesters, and Straffords, the lessons of Bacon and Machiavelli found apt scholars in the halls of Dunmanway and Dungannon. The multitude, in the meanwhile, saw only the broad fact that the Chief had bowed his neck to the hated Saxon yoke, and had promised, or would be by and by compelled, to introduce foreign garrisons, foreign judges, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... So little was the science of gunnery advanced in other parts of Europe at this period, and indeed later, that it was usual for a field-piece not to be discharged more than twice in the course of an action, if we may credit Machiavelli, who, indeed, recommends dispensing with the use of artillery altogether. Arte della Guerra, ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... his best cloth, with boots freshly polished and face smoothly shaven, with queue and ruffles in perfect condition, a Beau Brummel of exterior proprieties and a Machiavelli in finesse, Aaron Burr presented himself at the barracks, and was welcomed with effusive cordiality by his friend and comrade. The two shook hands with the hearty familiarity of veterans glad to ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... O'Connell. The fact that neither Gregory XVI. nor Pio Nono made any response to these appeals lends point to the sardonic comment of Disraeli on the Minto mission—that he had gone to teach diplomacy to the countrymen of Machiavelli. The views of Palmerston, on the other hand, are to be seen from a letter addressed to Minto, which is extant, in which, with characteristic bluntness, the Foreign Secretary wrote that public opinion ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... avenging stroke. "In such a company as this, A tale so tragic seems amiss, That by its terrible control O'ermasters and drags down the soul Into a fathomless abyss. The Italian Tales that you disdain, Some merry Night of Straparole, Or Machiavelli's Belphagor, Would cheer us and delight us more, Give greater pleasure and less pain Than your ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... typed 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 from an engraving. ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... hating it. They looked at it as artists or as statesmen; and, so looking at it, they liked it better in the established form than in any other. It was to them what the old Pagan worship was to Trajan and Pliny. Neither the spirit of Savonarola nor the spirit of Machiavelli had anything in common with the spirit of the religious or political Protestants ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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
... citizen 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 to Miss Wetherell, and I am ready to welcome you home, where I ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of them in others—they are all liars; the many who imagine a vain thing and pretend to be what they are not liars everyone of them. It is bound to be so in the great cities, and it is a mark of decay. The skirts of Elegabalus, the wigs and rouge pots of Madame Pompadour, the crucifix of Machiavelli and the innocent smile of Fernando Wood stand for something horribly and vastly false in the people about them. For truth you ve got to get back into the woods. You can find men there a good deal as God made them' genuine, strong and simple. When those men cease to come here you'll ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... Chenier, and many others of our contemporaries. Then I have read, of course, Moliere, Racine, Corneille, besides many other lesser French writers. Of foreign authors, I am intimate with the works of Gozzi, Goldoni, Guarini, Bibbiena, Machiavelli, Secchi, Tasso, Ariosto, and Fedini. Whilst of those of antiquity I know most of the work ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... 366. It was Machiavelli who first laid down the maxim that when the State's salvation is at stake there must be no enquiry into the purity of the means employed; only let the State be secured and no one will condemn them.—H. v. TREITSCHKE, P., ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... sixteenth 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 ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... insignificant the truth may be, they may yet find some truth to believe. This has been the condition of too many great men in the church of Rome; and it accounts for that bitterness of feeling with which Machiavelli, and others like him, appear to have regarded the whole ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... that human prudence does everything, and Divine providence nothing except sustaining the universe in the order in which it was created; also that murders, adulteries, thefts, frauds, and revenge are allowable, as held by Machiavelli and his followers. These and many like things the natural man is able to confirm, and even to fill volumes with the confirmations; and when such falsities are confirmed they appear in their delusive light, but truths in such obscurity as to be seen only as phantoms ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... religious works are to be the Old and New Testament, the Koran, a selection of the works of the Fathers of the Church, works respecting the Aryans, Calvinists, of Mythology, &c. The epics are to be Homer, Lucan, Tasso, Telemachus, The Henriade, &c." Machiavelli, Fielding, Richardson, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Corneille, Racine, and Rousseau were also among the ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... contributing in no slight measure to the general disturbance of Italy. The Malatesti were a race of strongly marked character: more, perhaps, than any other house of Italian tyrants, they combined for generations those qualities of the fox and the lion, which Machiavelli thought indispensable to a successful despot. Son after son, brother with brother, they continued to be fierce and valiant soldiers, cruel in peace, hardy in war, but treasonable and suspicious in all transactions that ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... 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 more than ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... Florentine thinker whose book was constantly in his hand. Even as a servant of Wolsey he startled the future Cardinal, Reginald Pole, by bidding him take for his manual in politics the "Prince" of Machiavelli. Machiavelli hoped to find in Caesar Borgia or in the later Lorenzo de' Medici a tyrant who after crushing all rival tyrannies might unite and regenerate Italy; and terrible and ruthless as his policy was, the final aim of Cromwell seems to have been that of Machiavelli, an aim of securing enlightenment ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... education becomes as general in South Africa as it is among the people of Europe then it will be 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 ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... language was not ripe for their success; perhaps the craftsmen's strength and experience were not equal to the novelty of their attempt. But no one can compare the English styles of the first half of the sixteenth century with the contemporary styles of Italy, with Ariosto, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, without feeling the immense gap in point of culture, practice, and skill—the immense distance at which the Italians were ahead, in the finish and reach of their instruments, in their power to handle them, in command over their resources, and facility and ease in ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... Trollope's Beata, Hallam on the Study of Roman Law in the Middle Ages, Gibbon on the Revival of Greek Learning, Burlamachi's Life of Savonarola; also Villari's life of the great preacher, Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art, Machiavelli's works, Petrarch's Letters, Casa Guidi Windows, Buhle's History of Modern Philosophy, Story's Roba di Roma, Liddell's Rome, Gibbon, Mosheim, and one might almost say the whole range of Italian literature in the original. Of Mommsen's History of Rome she ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... 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
... Man to conceal his Thoughts (Vol. i., p. 83.).—The maxim quoted by your correspondent F.R.A. was invented, if I may rely upon the notebook of memory, by the Florentine Machiavelli. The German ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 50. Saturday, October 12, 1850 • Various
... 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 ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... 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, first Earl of, Mandeville, Viscount. See Manchester, Earl of. Mansell, Sir Robert, Marlborough, ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... preserving. Thus, under Machiavellist: "I have heard that a philosopher, being asked by a great prince about a refutation of Machiavellism, which the latter had just published, replied, 'Sire, I fancy that the first lesson that Machiavelli would have given to his disciple would have been to refute his work.'" Whether Voltaire ever did say this to the great Frederick, is very questionable, but it would not have been ill said. After the reader has been taken through ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... recent dissatisfied perusal 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 which, as ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... notion of the position and policy of the Italian despots may be derived from a little treatise called The Prince, written by the distinguished Florentine historian, Machiavelli. The writer appears to have intended his book as a practical manual for the despots of his time. It is a cold-blooded discussion of the ways in which a usurper may best retain his control over a town after he has once got possession of it. The author even takes up the questions ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... became no less general in the vernacular than in Latin, and the band of pastoral poets included men so different in temperament as Machiavelli, who left a 'Capitolo pastorale' among his miscellaneous works, and Ariosto, whose eclogue on the conspiracy contrived in 1506 against Alfonso d'Este was published from manuscript in 1835. The fashion of the piscatory eclogue, set by Sannazzaro in Latin, was followed ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... remains to add that, in carrying out this system, Maria Theresa was too wise to fall into the errors afterwards made by her son and successor. She was no doctrinaire, and consistently acted on the principle once laid down by Machiavelli, that while changing the substance, the prince should be careful to preserve the form of old institutions. Alongside the new bureaucracy, the old estates survived in somnolent inactivity, and even in Hungary, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... 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 ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... the historian of the Renaissance, says in his Age of the Despots, Machiavelli was the first in modern times to formulate a theory of government in which the interests of the ruler are alone regarded, ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... Bernardo dei 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... even in his "Floor Games" and "Little Wars" has Mr. Wells, or any other author succeeded in drawing so convincing a picture of the possibilities of constructive play as is to be found in those pages, all too brief, in "The New Machiavelli" where the play laboratory at Bromstead is described. One can imagine the eager boy who played there looking back across the years strong in the conviction that it could not have been improved, and yet the picture of a child at solitary ...
— A Catalogue of Play Equipment • Jean Lee Hunt
... tourists; their noses were as red as their Baedekers, so cold was Santa Croce. She beheld the horrible fate that overtook three Papists—two he-babies and a she-baby—who began their career by sousing each other with the Holy Water, and then proceeded to the Machiavelli memorial, dripping but hallowed. Advancing towards it very slowly and from immense distances, they touched the stone with their fingers, with their handkerchiefs, with their heads, and then retreated. ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... the library and read the first few pages of Machiavelli's "History of Florence," about a king of the Zepidi and his daughter, Rosamond, and he slept, and as he slept ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... peace; Napoleon and Palmerston understand each other, and Palmerston is the only statesman in England and Europe who conceives rightly the Italian question. Russia follows him. I still hope by the autumn to be able to bless the God of free Italy beside Dante's and Machiavelli's graves. With us (Prussia) matters move fairly forwards; here they have been fools, and begin to feel ashamed of themselves. So a speedy and ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... maxims, though they were often very moral, and generally very wise, served to expand the peasant boy's native good qualities, and correct his bad, half so well as the few simple words, not at all indebted to Machiavelli, which Leonard had once reverently listened to when he stood by his father's chair, yielded up for the moment to the good Parson, worthy to sit in it; for Mr. Dale had a heart in which all the fatherless of the parish ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... Enthusiastic idealism is too precious an energy to be wasted if we can spare it false efforts by recognizing those permanent ingredients of our being indicated by the words pugnacity, greed, sex, fear. Machiavelli was not inclined to make little of what an unhampered ruler could do with his subjects; yet he saw in such passions as these a fixed limit to the power of the Prince. "It makes him hated above all things to be rapacious, and to be violator of the property and women of his subjects, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... analyses the Novum Organum and the Advancement of Learning, and he reads or re-reads Locke's Essay. He studies political science in the two great manuals of the old world and the new, in the Politics of Aristotle and the Prince of Machiavelli. He goes through three or four plays of Schiller; also Manzoni, and Petrarch, and Dante at the patient rate of a couple of cantos a day; then Boccaccio, from whom, after a half-dozen of the days, he willingly parts company, only ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... 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 and a man. Smith is almost ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... 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, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various
... your 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
... l'Esprit des Lois. Interesting from an historical point of view, are the theories contained in the works of political philosophers in the past. See Plato's Republic; Aristotle's Politics, Cicero's De Republica; Thomas Aquinas' Of the Government of Principles; Dante's De Monarchia; Machiavelli's Prince; Jean Bodin's Of the Commonwealth; Hobbes' Leviathan; Filmer's Patriarcha; Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity; Locke's Civil Government; J.J. Rousseau's Social Contract; Bentham's Fragment on Government; J.S. Mills' ...
— Government and Administration of the United States • Westel W. Willoughby and William F. Willoughby
... of the actions of States have in all times been aware, not of the fixed antagonism, but of the essential distinction, between the two codes. Every principle of Machiavelli is implicit in Thucydides, and Sulla, whom Montesquieu selects as the supreme type of Roman grandeur, does but follow principles which reappear in the politics of an Innocent III or a Richelieu, a Cromwell or ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... life. Momssen, elected to the Prussian Landtag, flirted with the Socialists. How much better we would understand the habits and nature of man if there were more historians like Julius Caesar, or even like Niccolo Machiavelli! Remembering the sharp and devastating character of their rough notes, think what marvelous histories Bismarck, Washington and Frederick the Great might have written! Such men are privy to the facts; the usual historians have to depend on deductions, rumors, guesses. Again, such men know how ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... aver riposo 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
... the mental existence of the invalid—were, as might be supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over such works as the Ververt and Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D'Indagine, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun of Campanella. One favorite volume was a small octavo edition ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... volumes, which from that time became his 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
... is as safe in my care as in that of his Holiness," he said, "and it is to my interest that the boy alone should die. It was the great statesman Machiavelli who counselled that when a city was captured every male heir to its former lord should be slain, to guard against uprisings in the future. I will take her son into my own safe-conduct, but you may escort his sisters and mother ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... 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 improvements. Later theories were no more satisfactory. The French ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... and Margaret. The King's letter, blind and blundering as 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Italian writers of these times {368} may be mentioned Guicciardini and Machiavelli. The former wrote a history of Italy, and the latter is rendered immortal by his Prince. Guicciardini was a native of Florence, who had an important position in the service of Leo X. As professor of jurisprudence, ambassador to Spain, and subsequently minister of Leo X, governor ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... religion is indispensable as a social machine was general among ancient unbelievers. It is common, in one form or another, to-day; at least, religions are constantly defended on the ground not of truth but of utility. This defence belongs to the statecraft of Machiavelli, who taught that religion is necessary ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... own interest; neither to love nor put trust in anyone; and not to promote the views or advantage of either brother or sister. These and other maxims of the like nature, drawn from the 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 began ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... said Riccabocca, taking 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
... 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 of ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... 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 when wielded against one's prejudices, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Church, in 1376, for the administration of the city government. Two were chosen from the 'Signori', three, from the 'Mediocri' (Middle Classes), and three, from the 'Bassi' (Lower Classes). For their subsequent history, see 'Le Istorie Fiorentine di Niccolo Machiavelli'. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... unreasonable, pestilent little democratic cities,—Athens and Florence. Extinguish the architecture and the sculpture, the poetry and the philosophy of Attica; obliterate from the sum of civilization the names of Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli,—of Cimabue, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Michel Angelo,—of Brunetto, Ficino, Politian; and how much diminished will be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... that time, and we had a good-natured nonentity in the White House then, who let things go till war became inevitable. I think President Hartley can be trusted to take a strong line of policy. In the meantime, you can read Machiavelli." ...
— Time and Time Again • Henry Beam Piper
... The philosopher 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 ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... 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 ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... 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 ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... 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 ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... they act in similar unconsciousness of the abstractions which impel them. Moreover, the Idea is usually clothed in a concrete Ideal, a personification, which brings it home to the simplest mind. This was long ago pointed out by the observant Machiavelli in his statement that every reform of a government or religion is in the popular mind personified as ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... 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 think ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... proof one evening when, after scheming and plotting in a way that had made the great efforts of Machiavelli and Richelieu seem like the work of raw novices, he had cut Molly out from the throng, and carried her off for the alleged purpose of helping him feed the chickens. There were, as he had suspected, chickens attached ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 ever concocted. ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... 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
... a writer, and which I do not hesitate to say makes him the equal, or perhaps the superior, of the statesman, is his judgment, whatever it may be, on human affairs, and his absolute devotion to certain principles. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bossuet, Leibnitz, Kant, Montesquieu, are the science which statesmen apply. "A writer ought to have settled opinions on morals and politics; he should regard himself as a tutor of men; for men need no masters to teach them to doubt," says Bonald. I took these ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... him a little by a short term of imprisonment. He is restless and easily led; a lesson in time may save his honored house from disaster. But to Carillo no quarter." He rose and stood over them. "The best thing in Machiavelli's 'Prince,'" he said, "is the author's advice to Caesar Borgia to exterminate every member of the reigning house of a conquered country, in order to avoid future revolutions and their infinitely ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... precincts lie Ashes which make it holier, dust which is Even in itself an immortality. Though there were something save the past, and this The particles of those sublimities Which have relapsed to chaos:—here repose Angelo's, Alfieri's bones, and his The starry Galileo, with his woes; Here Machiavelli's earth ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... interprets with consummate ability Mr. PHILLPOTTS' amusing and original creation, this puss-in-gaiters Machiavelli, St. George Exon. Miss LILLAH MCCARTHY (Monica), in the familiar role of beauty in revolt, had an easy task, which she fulfilled very agreeably. Miss ALBANESI (Eva) put brains and fire and (not at all a negligible gift of the gods) precise enunciation ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... 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 some verses of ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... receives its name from the remarkable church of Santa Croce which is located here, and which is the Italian Pantheon or Westminster Abbey, where rest the ashes of Alfieri, Machiavelli, Galileo, and a score of equally historic names. What a galaxy of great poets, artists, statesmen, and philosophers are here sleeping in their winding-sheets. Another fine square is that of the Piazza della Annunziata, in which ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... all the qualities which he prized 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 ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... refuge willingly in the shadow of 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 sense of the contrast he ventures ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 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, and grunted with exasperation. Well, after all, what of it? ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... made up Annie's, and grew to sway her utterly, save for gusts of ungovernable emotions and an equally ungovernable temper. The little Ishmael learned to fear, to evade, and to lie, till he bade fair to become an infant Machiavelli, and at night his sins—the tremendous sins of childhood—would weigh upon him so that he broke into a sweat ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Prince (Il Principe), chap. xvii., by Niccolo Machiavelli, translated by Ninian Hill Thomson, 1897, p. 121: "But above all [a Prince] must abstain from the property of others. For men will sooner forget the death of their father than the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... of omnipotent analysis. He is far too preoccupied 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 ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... crime as Baglioni, they rode together to Perugia, 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 his subjects, and boasted ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucault, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Colonel Machiavelli Sneekins sustained an important relation to the Reform movement, and at this Grand Rally of Non-Partisan Citizens in the Interest of Reform, he had, with great propriety, selected himself to be Master of Ceremonies. Colonel Sneekins was a non-partisan citizen. He looked ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... 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
... said to me afterwards, "those fellows opposite always laugh when I drop in my most diplomatic sentences. It's very well for MACHIAVELLI that he didn't live in these times, and lead House of Commons instead of the Government of the Florentine Republic. He would never have opened his mouth without those Radicals and Irishmen going off into ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... I'll be as mysterious a double-dealer as any Venezuelan that ever plotted a plot. I admit," he went on, "that when I came down here I was the frank, wide-eyed child, but, I assure you, I've reformed. Your people have made me a real Metternich, a genuine Machiavelli. Compared to me now, a Japanese business man is as honest and truth-loving as Mrs. Wiggs of ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... as uncivilized, a 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 the ground of bigotry. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... 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 abound ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... defied repression. To the end of the Middle Ages the 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 the growth of better communities—better ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... 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 uncle, who ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Orlando, who had missed his opportunity of seizing the golden forelock while she was sleeping, pursues her a long while in vain through rocky deserts, La Penitenza following him with a scourge. The same idea was afterwards happily worked out by Machiavelli in ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... 'Seek whom the crime profits,' says Machiavelli. What profit would it be to such a scoundrel to do ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... publicity in our power to a statement which, from our personal knowledge, we can declare to be true. If the disclosures which a debate on this subject must inevitably lead to will not convince Englishmen that Ireland is now governed by a party whose falsehood and subtlety not even Machiavelli himself could justify, we are free to declare we are ready to join the Nationalists to-morrow, and to cry out for a Parliament in College Green, in preference to a ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... 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 ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... the narrow sense in which it came to be interpreted, needed for its success, what cannot be had under party government, twenty years of consistency. It may be better to be feared than to be loved, but Machiavelli would have been the first to admit that his principle did not apply where the Government which sought to establish fear had to reckon with an Opposition which was making capital out of love. Moreover, the suggestion that ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... names compared with those of the ancients. Spirit excited in England and in France by the writers of the Plutarch class. Livy. Caesar. Sallust. Tacitus. Merits and defects of modern historians. Froissart, Machiavelli, and Guicciardine. Effect of the invention of printing. Causes of the exclusiveness of the Greeks and Romans. Effect of the victory of Christianity over paganism. Establishment of the balance of moral and intellectual influence in Europe. The species of misrepresentation ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... after the old soldier, whose face had brightened at the resolve, and his eyes gleamed with a sardonic expression, which showed the mental superiority of this subaltern Machiavelli. ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... have directed. The world still rings with the 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 can ever forget that it was able to put fourteen armies into the field ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... once supposed to have been profitably exercised, of which the world was called upon to take notice, and to pay in silver to-day or to let it alone to-morrow. I know that the detestable doctrine of Machiavelli was that "a prudent prince ought not to keep his word except when he can do it without injury to himself;" but the Bible teaches a different doctrine, and honoreth him "who sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not." If we would not multiply examples ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... 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 ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... move in some complicated scheme directed against the Union. What it is, we do not yet know, but further observation of the actions of their own representative on this planet has convinced us that they are a clever, ruthless people, living in a society which would have put Machiavelli to shame. They are single-minded of purpose, and welded into a tight group whose major purpose in life is the service of the state in its major purpose, which, by all indications, is that ...
— Citadel • Algirdas Jonas Budrys
... Machiavelli was the first to declare that the keynote of every policy was the advancement of power. This term, however, has acquired, since the German Reformation, a meaning other than that of the shrewd Florentine. To him ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... into no calculation—drawn hither and thither by powers that can never be represented in your algebra. In one generation Christianity reduced Plato's republic to an absurdity. The printing-press has upset the unanswerable conclusions of Machiavelli." ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... bidder. The bishop extorted money from the priests, and these robbed the people. The grossest immorality was prevalent in all ranks of the Church, and without concealment. Even the monasteries and convents were often dens of vice. "Italy," said Machiavelli, "has lost all piety and all religion. We have to thank the Church and the priests ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli says of political institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. And this is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all language, institution and form, require ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... action on behalf of Greece, and would have done so on behalf of the Armenians, to save the national honour and prevent a monstrous wrong. The Gladstonian principle may be defined by antithesis to that of Machiavelli, and to that of Bismarck, and to the practice of every Foreign Office. As that practice proceeds on the principle that reasons of State justify everything, so Gladstone proceeded on the principle that reasons of State justify nothing ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... 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, as well as Mr. ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... di Papa Alessandro, in Tommaso Inghirami's Fea, 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
... Mr. Wells to offer us territorial compensation, but we respectfully decline such a reward for the sort of attack which was popular in the days of the old Machiavelli. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... one of the great thinkers of the age. I could get into the castle as a waiter, and you could tell Lady Maud I was there, and we could arrange a meeting. Machiavelli couldn't have thought ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... revolted Mitylene, are intended to prepare the reader for the tragic fate of the Sicilian expedition. The same writer describes the break-up of all social morality during the civil war in words which seem to herald the destruction not only of Athens but of Greek freedom. Machiavelli's 'Prince' shows how history can repeat itself, reiterating its lesson that a nation which gives itself to immoral aggrandisement is far on the road to disintegration. Seneca's rebuke to his slave-holding countrymen, 'Can you complain that you have been robbed of the liberty which you ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... working of the political Machine in a great 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 ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... him. That's why! I have unmasked this—this Borgia—this Machiavelli—this monster of duplicity! Matters are approaching a point where something has got to be done short of murder. I've stood all his envy and jealousy and cheap imputations and hints and contemptible innuendoes that ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... of Law, made such extensive travels 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
... Frederick the Great. Croker's Boswell's Johnson. Hallam's Constitutional History. Warren Hastings. (3d. sewed, 6d. cloth.) The Earl of Chatham (Two Essays). Ranke and Gladstone. Milton and Machiavelli. Lord Bacon. Lord Clive. Lord Byron, and The ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... in his about hares. First catch your perfectly sincere and unconscious man. He is even more uncommon than a genius of the first order. Most men dress themselves for their autobiographies, as Machiavelli used to do for reading the classics, in their best clothes; they receive us, as it were, in a parlor chilling and awkward from its unfamiliarity with man, and keep us carefully away from the kitchen-chimney-corner, where they would feel at home, and would not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... 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
... man is for me the word of God, whether by parsons or prostitutes it has been brought together, enrolled in the canon, or flung as fragments to the winds. And with my innermost soul I fall as a brother on the neck of Moses! Prophet! Evangelist! Apostle! Spinoza or Machiavelli! But to each I am permitted to say: 'Dear friend, it is with you as it is with me; in the particular you feel yourself grand and mighty, but the whole goes as little into your head as ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... make his work interesting chiefly for its 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
... then 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 ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... the Church of Santa Croce, from time to time, in Florence, to weep over the tombs of Michael Angelo, Raphael and Machiavelli, (I suppose they are buried there, but it may be that they reside elsewhere and rent their tombs to other parties—such being the fashion in Italy,) and between times we used to go and stand on the bridges and admire the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to the nations." In three sentences here are six allusions to Scripture. In that same essay, in the paragraphs on the Puritans, the allusions are a multitude. They are not even quoted. They are taken for granted. In his Essay on Machiavelli, though the subject does not suggest it, he falls into Scriptural phrases over and over. Listen to this, "A time was at hand when all the seven vials of the Apocalypse were to be poured forth and shaken out over those pleasant countries"; or this, ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... the day on which I was arrested," returned the Abbe Faria; "and as the emperor had created the kingdom of Rome for his infant son, I presume that he has realized the dream of Machiavelli and Caesar Borgia, which was to make ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... in France that renders the position of premier in it almost untenable; and he must unite the firmness of a stoic, the knowledge of a Machiavelli, and the boldness of a Napoleon, who could hope to stem the tide that menaces to set in and sweep away the present institutions. If honesty of intention, loyalty to his sovereign, personal courage, attachment to his country, ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... which he read is significant: Coxe's "Travels in Switzerland," Duclos's "Memoirs of the Reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV," Machiavelli's "History of Florence," Voltaire's "Essay on Manners," Duvernet's "History of the Sorbonne," Le Noble's "Spirit of Gerson," and Dulaure's "History of the Nobility." There exist among his papers outlines more or less complete of all these books. They prove that ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... support of the superstition that corrupted them. This was reversing the duty of a Christian and a great man; and there happen to be existing reasons why it is salutary to chew that he had no right to do so, and must not have his barbarism confounded with his strength. Machiavelli was of opinion, that if Christianity had not reverted to its first principles, by means of the poverty and pious lives of St. Francis and St. Dominic,[2] the faith would have been lost. It may have been; but such are not the secrets of its preservation in times of science and progression, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... life in the character of no animal more moral than a monkey unless he could satisfy himself when and why robbery and murder were a virtue and duty. Education founded on mere self-interest was merely Guelph and Ghibelline over again — Machiavelli translated ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... to rule the nation. They flattery swallow: do not fear,— No nonsense will offend their ear: Though you be sycophant professed, You will not put his soul to test. If policy should be his care, Drum MACHIAVELLI in his ear; If commerce or the naval service, Potter of Mazarin and Jervis. Always, with due comparison, By him let all that 's done be done; Troops, levies, and ambassadors, Treaties and taxes, wars and stores; No ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... 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 than ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... 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 before him. He, then, who abandons hope of making good his claims to the ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... churchman, more 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 at least two ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... matter of breeding; and Chesterfield or Machiavelli could have found no better answer ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... 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, ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... with the moral aspect of politics discussed and makes no pretence of condemning immoral practices or making itself a champion of virtue. In other words, Washington addresses an audience which had passed through the Puritan Revolution, while Machiavelli spoke to men who were familiar with the ideals and crimes ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... 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 authority. In ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... then in the suit against Victurnien d'Esgrignon, charged with forgery, he immediately took part in the prosecution. That a preliminary trial might be avoided he kept away from Alencon, but a judgment which acquitted Victurnien was rendered during his absence. M. du Ronceret, in Machiavelli fashion, manoeuvred to gain for his son Fabien the hand of a wealthy heiress of the city, Mademoiselle Blandureau, who had also been sought by Judge Blondet for his son Joseph. In this contest the judge won over his chief. [Jealousies of a Country Town.] M. du Ronceret ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... must here also speak with hesitation) that any one drama of Shakespeare contains so many. Smile as you will, Signor Conte, what must I think of a city where Michel Angelo, Frate Bartolomeo, Ghiberti (who formed them), Guicciardini, and Machiavelli were secondary men? And certainly such were they, if we compare them with ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor |
