“One change always leaves the way open for the establishment of others.”

Politics have no relation to morals.

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.

Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries – for heavy ones they cannot.

He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.

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.

No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.

Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.

Severities should be dealt out all at once, so that their suddenness may give less offense.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great.

A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.

Tardiness often robs us opportunity, and the dispatch of our forces.

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Whoever conquers a free town and does not demolish it commits a great error and may expect to be ruined himself.

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.

The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.

I owe much; I have nothing; the rest I leave to the poor.

Human foresight often leaves its proudest possessor only a choice of evils.

You want the tension to escalate. Keeping them there is the hardest part, so you have to take away any excuse for them to leave.

Of its origin, of its history, of its object, nor any explanation of its mysteries and symbols, which does not leave the mind in total uncertainty on all these points.

The book of Nature is that which the physician must read; and to do so he must walk over the leaves.

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

The thing is if you have 10 views that land you on the left side of the aisle and two views that land you on the right side of the aisle, then people just put you on the right side of the aisle. I’m not sure why.

The great experimental principle, then, is doubt, that philosophic doubt which leaves to the mind its freedom and initiative, and from which the virtues most valuable to investigators in physiology and medicine are derived.