No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution. – Niccolo Machiavelli
So long as the great majority of men are not deprived of either property or honor, they are satisfied. – Niccolo Machiavelli
It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope. – Niccolo Machiavelli
Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others. – Niccolo Machiavelli
What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love. – Francois de La Rochefoucauld