Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes

Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.

power, after it has ceased from troubling, is the dominant passion in human nature.

Take mankind as they are, and what are they governed by? Their passions.

Knowledge of mankind is a knowledge of their passions.

I can measure the motion of bodies but I cannot measure human folly.

If morality had naturally no influence on human passions and actions, it were in vain to take such pains to inculcate it; and nothing would be more fruitless than that multitude of rules and precepts with which all moralists abound.

All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.

Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature.

Human behavior is timeless.

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.

Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures, than from the convulsions of the elements.

Anecdote: It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state.

Lust is the source of all our actions, and humanity.

Irrational passions would seem to be as much a part of human nature as is reason.

There is no accounting for human beings.

It seems a pity that psychology has destroyed all our knowledge of human nature.

I am more interested in what moves people, than how they move.

Men never desire anything very eagerly which they desire only by the dictates of reason.

Interesting people always have a past.

It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.

All human life is sunk deep in untruth; the individual cannot pull it out of this well without growing profoundly annoyed with his entire past, without finding his present motives (like honor) senseless, and without opposing scorn and disdain to the passions that urge one on to the future and to the happiness in it.

If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant's reasoning to the grown man's passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.

It is of men, and of them only, that one should always be frightened.

We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.

Man is a mixture of desires that extend beyond his knowledge and often result in action conflicting with rationality.