Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes

Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.

There are no persons capable of stooping so low as those who desire to rise in the world.

Passion, prejudice, and error, are characteristics of human nature ….. Literary talents may be prostituted, and the powers of genius debased to subserve the purposes of ambition or avarice.

All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained thereunto either by force or fraud, and what they have by craft or cruelty gained, to cover the foulness of their fact, they call purchase, as a name more honest. Howsoever, he that for want of will or wit useth not those means, must rest in servitude and poverty.

Never use your own money. Steal a good idea and say it's your own. Do anything to get publicity. Remember that everybody can be bought.

Ambition is exhausting. It makes you friends with people for the wrong reasons, just like drugs.

For when success a lover's toil attends,Few ask, if fraud or force attain'd his ends

Politics is a great art. It succeeds at convincing the people that they have to pay for what has been stolen from them.

Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity.

I have flatly refused to be conned by Jyoti Basu and his corrupt government.

You have to be careful of social climbers. There are a lot of potholes out there.

I suppose, unconsciously, I used all my wives to further my journey up the ladder.

Trump is a dust storm of lies and diversions with the bellows of a bully and the greasy ethics of a street-corner hustler.

When I ascended from the depths of the working class to the middle class, the higher I got, the more dishonesty I found.

Everything is susceptible to corruption of one sort or another - humanity is one big cheat - but it matters particularly with sport, which ceases to be itself the minute the outcome's rigged.

It's true that people will take advantage of you in Nigeria, but this happens everywhere in the world.

Nicolas Maduro is a fraud. He is a fake. He is a charlatan.

Nearly everyone who chooses to work for Donald Trump is disreputable in one way or another; Ali Baba didn't find 40 wise men in the cave. But to label everyone in Trumpworld a grifter misses important subtleties. It conflates grifters and grafters, and it ignores the crucial distinction between the two.

I love the characters in 'Wolf of Wall Street' and 'House of Cards.'

The IOC have decided Russia will pay them £50 million, and that is their punishment for 40 years of duping the world and going against every single clean athlete on earth. The IOC has fought a spectacular fraud with more fraud.

L.A. is a very illusory place. You don't really know who your friends are here because more often than not, it seems like it's just about getting ahead at any cost.

In every sport you get cheats.

As society becomes more and more complex, cheating will in many ways become progressively easier and easier to do and harder to police or even understand.

Corrupt people sometimes are smart; some of them are dull, but some of them are very smart. They can hide their corruption tactics.

Any game looks straight if everyone is being cheated at once.