Niccolo Machiavelli 1469 – 1527
Niccolo Machiavelli was an Italian Renaissance diplomat, historian, and political philosopher of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, often described as the founder of modern political science. He served the Florentine republic in diplomatic and military roles until the return of the Medici family ended his career. His most famous work, The Prince, written in 1513 during his enforced retirement, analyses the practical conduct of political power without appeal to theological or moralistic categories. His longer and more substantive Discourses on Livy is a republican meditation on the political experience of ancient Rome. His name became synonymous in English with cynical realpolitik, often unfairly: his political thought is more nuanced and is now read as a foundational text of modern political philosophy.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Italian
- Era
- Modern
- Movements
- Political, Renaissance
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Niccolo Machiavelli:
“It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”
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Attributed to Niccolo Machiavelli:
“Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.”
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Attributed to Niccolo Machiavelli:
“Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.”
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Attributed to Niccolo Machiavelli:
“He who builds on the people, builds on the mud.”
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Attributed to Niccolo Machiavelli:
“There is no other way of guarding oneself against flattery than by letting men understand that to tell you the truth does not offend you.”
Quotes that are not actually from Niccolo Machiavelli
These lines are widely circulated as Niccolo Machiavelli, but they do not appear in Niccolo Machiavelli's works. Each entry below identifies the actual source.
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“The end justifies the means.”
Machiavelli is universally credited with this maxim but does not state it in this form anywhere in The Prince or the Discourses on Livy. The closest passage, in The Prince Chapter 18, says only that in the actions of princes, where there is no court of appeal, the end is regarded; the modern English aphorism is a later compression. Variants of the underlying idea appear earlier in Ovid's Heroides and in 17th-century Jesuit moral theology, particularly in Hermann Busenbaum's Medulla Theologiae Moralis (1650).