Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes

For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new.

A revolution has taken place within the government but it has not yet penetrated civil society.

The reformer has enemies in all who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order.

If things do not change, there will be nothing left to change. Either power must pass to the people or everything will perish.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.

All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions.

I am for the restoration of order, not for the restoration of the old order.

… the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old.

Revolution is a transfer of property from class to class.

Let us not be so naive as to think that revolution is just a matter of social or economic discontent.

As David Cameron realizes, we do not have time for the tweaks and increments favored by institutions built to resist change.

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

I was always much impressed, in reading prison memoirs of revolutionists, such as Lenin and Trotsky ... by the amount of reading they did, the languages they studied, the range of their plans for a better social order. (Or rather, for a new social order.) In the Acts of the Apostles there are constant references to the Way and the New Man.

Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited.

Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one

Universal peace will be realized, not because man will become better, but because a new order of things, a new science, new economic necessities, will impose peace.

The process of which I am speaking is nothing less than a conservative revolution on such a scale as the history of Europe has never known. Its object is form, a new German reality, in which the whole nation will share.

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

God grant that this is the work of the Communists. You are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history. This fire is the beginning.

There is very little point in trying to urge the world to mend its ways as long as that world is still convinced that its ways are perfectly adequate.

The world has witnessed the rise and fall of monarchy, the rise and fall of dictatorship, the rise and fall of feudalism, the rise and fall of communism, and the rise of democracy; and now we are witnessing the fall of democracy... the theme of the evolution of life continues, sweeping away with it all that does not blossom into perfection.

It's not a revolution if nobody loses

Let us remember that revolutions do not always establish freedom.

Significant and seemingly impossible social and political change happens more often than we think, and it happens more rapidly than we realize. Even the most momentous change is always possible if one finds the right way to make it happen.

It's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that's not where we're going. But, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.