"Machiavellian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sin, because the swearing, undone man is a free agent, and can choose whether he will swear or no, anybody's wishes whatsoever to the contrary notwithstanding: And in politics I am sure it is even a Machiavellian holy maxim, "That some men should be ruined for the good of others." Thus I think I have answered all the objections that can be brought against this project's coming to perfection, and proved it ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... stands alone, ugly, if anything, timid-seeming but full of romance, hiding from every eye some imperishable secret of happiness and disenchantment. That land which knows not truth," he continued with Machiavellian subtlety, "that land of infinite fiction makes bad reading for any boy; and is certainly not what I should choose or recommend for my young friend here, who is already so much inclined to melancholy, for a heart ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... part of his wealth was buried in the cellars of his palace at Ferrara, whither he seldom went. As for the rest of his fortune, it was invested in a life annuity, with a view to give his wife and children an interest in keeping him alive; but this Machiavellian piece of foresight was scarcely necessary. His son, young Felipe Belvidero, grew up as a Spaniard as religiously conscientious as his father was irreligious, in virtue, perhaps, of the old rule, "A miser has a spendthrift son." The Abbot of San-Lucar ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... ciel a mis entre nos mains, et dont nous avons a retablir les interets!" Ferdinand was guilty of such monstrous perjuries and cruelties that the reader ought to be warned not to think of him as a saturnine and Machiavellian Italian. He was a son of the Bourbon Charles III. of Spain. His character was that of a jovial, rather stupid farmer, whom a freak of fortune had made a king from infancy. A sort of grotesque comic element runs through his life, and through every picture drawn by persons ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... my own body, that I might chastise a poltroon so un-philosophical. I took her by the hand instead, and led her into this room and made her sit down, and, whilst I sponged the picture with cold water, made her tell me how the accident had happened. For I thought, in my Machiavellian Italian way, 'If she should go away without having quite familiarised herself with this unhappy incident, she will always be afraid of me.' Therefore I lured ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... He deepened the complexion of crime and intensified lawlessness by robbing the Italian character of levity. Sin, in his conception of that character, was complicated with the sense of sin, as it never had been in a Florentine or a Neapolitan. He had not grasped the meaning of the Machiavellian conscience, in its cold serenity and disengagement from the dread of moral consequence. Not only are his villains stealthy, frigid, quick to evil, merciless, and void of honour; but they brood upon their crimes ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... the evacuation of Manila could not shake them. Another prisoner of state, Corcuera, who had fought the Moros in the Jolo Archipelago, was locked up in the Cuartel de Santiago at the instance of his Machiavellian successor. In 1642 the fort was strengthened by additional artillery because of an expected visit from the Dutch. Today a soldier in a khaki uniform mounts guard at the street entrance. The courtyard is adorned by pyramids of cannon-balls and tidy rows of bonga-trees. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... committing yourself in the slightest way; whereas, if you set to work wrongly, you might not only be foundered by a provoking reticence, which she could assume at times, but might, also, some day hear that your secret intentions and machiavellian conduct were the ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... found weighty strokes which come from th' hand, But those are killing strokes which come from th' head. Oh, the rare tricks of a Machiavellian! He doth not come, like a gross plodding slave, And buffet you to death; no, my quaint knave, He tickles you to death, makes you die laughing, As if you had swallow'd down a pound of saffron. You see the feat, 'tis practis'd in ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... dollars a year. She was openly proud of it; her poverty became, in a sense, her riches. "Well, all I have is just one hundred a year," she was fond of saying, "and I don't complain. I don't envy anybody. I have all I want." Her little plans for thrift were fairly Machiavellian; they showed subtly. She told everybody what she had for her meals. She boasted that she lived better than her brother, who was earning good wages in a shoe-factory. She dressed very well, really much better than her ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... very successful announcement, and Robert presided at table with extreme satisfaction on account of his own Machiavellian astuteness. Oh! those millionaires. What ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... Luck but Cunning, not the uninspired weeding out by Natural Selection but the intelligent striving of the organism, is at the bottom of the useful variety of organic life. And the parallel is drawn that not the happy accident of time and place, but the Machiavellian cunning of Charles Darwin, succeeded in imposing, as entirely his own, on the civilised world an uninspired and inadequate theory of evolution wherein luck played the leading part; while the more inspired and inspiring ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... I had taken a lifelong vow of separation from the British Isles and all things civilized, when after all it is only one short year out of my allotted span of life that I have promised to Mission work? Your steamer letter, with its Machiavellian arguments for returning immediately and directly from St. John's, was duly received. Of my unfitness for the work there is no possible doubt, no shadow of doubt whatever, and therein you and I are at one. But you will do me the justice to admit that I put very forcibly before those in charge of ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... my cousin's marvellous beauty, her rarest charm lay in her gracious manner, her unobtrusive vivacity, and her quaint combination of Sarah's Machiavellian wisdom with the intense femininity of Eve. Add to these qualities the unmistakable mark which a pure heart leaves on the face, and we complete the picture of one who in a short time was acknowledged to be without ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... Machiavellian policy against the United States soon became evident. After each submarine outrage would come an apology, frequently a promise of reparation and an agreement not to repeat the offense, with no intention, however, of keeping faith in ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... the reader, who may desire a closer insight into Cappy's Machiavellian nature, be it known that a sinker is a heavy, close-grained clear redwood butt-log, which, if cut in the spring, when the tree is alive with sap, is so heavy it will not float in the millpond; hence the term sinker. A vessel laden with lumber sawed from sinkers, therefore, will carry just fifty ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... Machiavellian stratagem the primary larva of the Oil-beetle or the Sitaris has penetrated the Anthophora's cell; it has settled on the egg, which is its first food and its life-raft in one. What becomes of it ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... Was nick-named "La Torpille." Was for some time one of the "rats" of the Royal Academy of Music, and numbered among her protectors, Lupeaulx. In 1823 her reduced circumstances almost forced her to leave Paris for Issoudun, where, for a machiavellian purpose, Philippe Bridau would have made her the mistress of Jean-Jacques Rouget. The affair did not materialize. She went to Mme. Meynardie's house where she remained till about the end of 1823. One evening, while passing the Porte-Saint-Martin theatre, she chanced to ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... celebrity augmented; and he defended himself by a confession of faith which forecast his endeavours—less persistent than his desires—to add the statesman's laurels to those of the litterateur. His doctrine, following the Machiavellian tradition, was that the genius of government consists in operating the fusion of men and things—a method which demonstrated Napoleon and Louis XVIII. alike to be men of talent. Both of them restrained all the various parties in France—the one by force, the other by ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... from Brighton, it was absolutely commonplace, and written upon note-paper which the detective, with Machiavellian cunning, traced to a stationer's shop in West Street. But the trade at that particular shop was a very brisk one; scores of people had bought note-paper there, similar to that on which the supposed doctor ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... This Sastra teaches a system or science of ethics such as moralists now-a-days designate as Machiavellian or jesuitical; in which right or wrong have a relative but little ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya |
