There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.
The one who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise that the one whose policy clashes with the demands of the times does not.
A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests.
Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.
Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.
Hence it comes about that all armed Prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed Prophets have been destroyed.
Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.
One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.
The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.
Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.
Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.
Men seldom rise from low condition to high rank without employing either force or fraud, unless that rank should be attained either by gift or inheritance.
The leader should know how to enter into evil when necessity commands.
I hope and hoping feeds my pain I weep and weeping feeds my failing heart I laugh but the laughter does not pass within I burn but the burning makes no mark outside.
We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either.
It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.
War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.
The new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once and for all.
To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people.
It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.