Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes

The decisive means for politics is violence.

Destroy or be destroyed-there is no middle way! Let us then be the destroyers!

Some people draw a comforting distinction between force and violence. I refuse to cloud the issue by such word-play. The power which establishes a state is violence; the power which maintains it is violence; the power which eventually overthrows it is violence. Call an elephant a rabbit only if it gives you comfort to feel that you are about to be trampled to death by a rabbit.

Physical violence is the basis of authority.

The world is ruled by violence, or at least the imminent threat of violence. It always has been.

No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody.

War is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.

Force, no matter how concealed, begets resistance.

All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence.

See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.

Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a struggle.

What you get with violence can be maintained only with violence

War is about remaking the world to suit the whims of some powerful group over the whims of some other powerful group. The dead are just the sparks that fly from the metal as they grind it down.

There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.

Force is not a remedy.

Dive on them and squash them if you must.

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

When I fight someone, I want to break his will. I want to take his manhood. I want to rip out his heart and show it to him.

Nobody knows through how many thousands of years fighting men have made a place for themselves while the weak and peaceable have gone to the wall.

Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.

Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

Aggression is inherently destructive of relationships. People and ideologies are pitted against each other, believing that in order to survive, they must destroy the opposition.

War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.

Power never takes a back step—only in the face of more power.