How important is Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince? I’d say that it’s not so important anymore. Anyone who’s half-aware of what’s going on in the world would find that Machiavelli is stating the obvious. In today’s world, the Machiavellian nature of politics is a given. We do not need to discover it; we know it from the start. There isn’t a man out there who believes politicians are honest folks just doing their job. They lie to us every day, and we know, but we believe them anyway. It’s how the world works.

So, in that respect, we can say that the contemporary man understands Machiavelli without even reading his work. In the past, people may have believed that there were honest princes or politicians, so The Prince could have shocked the readers of the past who could not even have guessed we’d have something called the internet one day. (In fact, 16th, 17th, and 18th-century readers were so disturbed that they believed Machiavelli was inspired by the devil.) In the 21st century, however, The Prince has become literature for the necrophiles. It is still readable, of course. But more than half a millennium has passed since Machiavelli’s death, and if one’s goal is to conquer the world, he’ll find books like Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power much more useful to him than merely The Prince.

Nonetheless, since I have revisited the book anyway, I’ll save some of the sentences I have underlined here and make a blog post out of it. Enjoy the quotes!

Quotes from Machiavelli’s The Prince

“It is in the nature of things that as soon as a powerful foreigner enters a province, all the weaker powers in it will become his allies through envy of those who have been ruling over them.”

“A prince must have no other objective, no other thought, nor take up any profession but that of war.”

“He who causes another to become powerful ruins himself.”

“A prince, therefore, should always seek advice, but only when he, not someone else, chooses.”

“A prince should avoid joining forces with someone more powerful than himself for the purpose of attacking another unless necessity compels him to do so.”

“A wise prince must provide in such a way that, in whatever circumstances, the citizens will always be in need of him and of his government. Then they will always be loyal to him.”