Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes

Power is not alluring to pure minds.

Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality

The purification of politics is an iridescent dream. Government is force.... The Decalogue and the Golden Rule have no place in a political campaign. The commander who lost the battle through the activity of his moral nature would be the derision and jest of history.

If the chief party ... be corrupt, you must follow their humor and indulge them, and in that case honesty and virtue are pernicious.

The prince must not mind incurring the scandal of those vices without which it would be difficult to save the state.

Governments almost never act with moral clarity and for very good reason. They are dealing with competing interests.

In political matters it is very hard for a man in office to be purer than his neighbours, — and, when he is so, he becomes troublesome.

It has now become the doctrine of a large class of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man's interests, and incompatible with quick onward movement.

Governor [Myron] Herrick is not a bad man; he is simply weak. He is one of those men who can do dishonest things honestly.

You can't adopt politics as a profession and remain honest.

A Plowman on his knees is higher than a Gentleman on his legs.

A prince can mak a belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a' that; But an honest man's aboon his might: Guid faith, he maunna fa' that.

Honest mediocrity is the most suitable condition for states; riches lead to softness and corruption.

[The Emperor] Vespasian's friends overcame his scruples by telling him that against Jews there could be no question of impiety, and that he ought to prefer expediency to decency when the two were incompatible.

I'm guilty as sin. I did something morally wrong. I gave in to the prestige and power, the things that went with my job. I knew that the Governor, the man that appointed me, wanted no recommendation for clemency in any death case.

Kings need the company of the intelligent far more than the intelligent need the company of kings.

The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest and ourselves united.

Be sensible, that is, cease to be honest.

A city in which the nobles obtain their desire, is nothing else but a company of masters and slaves ordered to the satisfaction of the avarice and dishonest wishes of the ruling class.

Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people in order to betray them.

Evidence that has surfaced has cast a black cloud of distrust over our entire society. Our citizens do not know whom to believe, and many of them have concluded that all the processes of government have become so compromised that honest government has been rendered impossible.

No matter how healthy a man's morals may be when he enters the White House, he comes out again with a pock-marked soul.

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises?

The higher classes of a nation can communicate virtue and wisdom to the government, if they themselves are virtuous and wise: but they can never give it strength; for strength always comes from below; it always proceeds from the masses

While you are gazed at for your American-manufactured principles, and gazing at the folly and pageantry of animals in the shape of men cringing at the feet of an animal called a king, I shall be secluded from the noise and corruption of the times.