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C01. Niccolò Machiavelli

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C01. Niccolò Machiavelli

First revision: Apr.14, 2024
Last change: Aug.6, 2026
Searched, gathered, rearranged, translated, and compiled by Apirak Kanchanakongkha.
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"Never was anything great achieved without danger."
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"The common people are always seduced by appearance and success."
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"Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth."

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*******Referenced from Success Strategies, a Facebook post dated June 17, 2026.****** We would like to express our gratitude at this opportunity.
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There are very few writers in history who are so famous that their names are used as insults.

Niccolò Machiavelli was one of them. Today, the word "Machiavellian" translates to cunning, immorality, and a willingness to step on others to gain power. Early Westerners even associated his name with the devil, jokingly calling Satan "Old Nick." In Shakespearean-era English theater, cunning villains were often called Machiavel. The Catholic Church took drastic action, banning his books.

Five hundred years later, his name has become synonymous with strategic evil.

Now, here's the first ironic twist: The man who became a symbol of tyranny and power struggles was, in real life, a loyal middle-class civil servant to the republic, a salaried diplomat, and someone who wanted most in his later years simply to get his government job back.

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	1.	"It appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of the matter than the imagination of it."
	2.	"How one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation."
	3.	"A man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil."
	4.	"It is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity."
	5.	"Men are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous; and as long as you succeed, they are yours entirely, but when [need] approaches, they turn against you."
	6.	"Men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails."
	7.	"They who lay the foundations of a state... must assume that all men are bad, and will always, when they have free field, give loose to their evil inclinations."

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