“It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”

Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.

Benefits should be conferred gradually; and in that way they will taste better.

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through 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.

He that has seen both sides of fifty has lived to little purpose if he has no other views of the world than he had when he was much younger.

An idler is a watch that wants both hands; As useless if it goes as when it stands.

Technologies will come and go, so you need to be able to both ask and answer the question: What do you do as a company, why do you exist?

I’ve had them both, and I don’t think much of either.

The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.

Did he say both things? Could he mean both things? How can both be true at once? Or is it possible that one of the Gospel writers got things switched around?

Live both in the future and the past. Who does not live in the past does not live in the future.