Machiavelli Niccolo: Političke misli

Niccolo Machiavelli: Political Thoughts

The question arises whether it is better that people love you or fear you, or vice versa. The answer is: both would be desirable; but since it is difficult to combine these two, it is much safer, when a man must be without one of these two, that they fear you.

If you consider the way people act, you will see that all those who reach great wealth and great power have reached them either by fraud or by force.

Women are the most merciful, but also the most boring creatures in the world. Whoever avoids them, gets rid of accidents, and also benefits;
whoever hangs out with them, he has as many benefits as worries. It is true that there is no honey without flies.

Niccolò Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469 in the city that played a decisive role in the art and politics of the Italian Renaissance, Florence. The Florentine Republic, like many other cities in Italy, was a city-republic, which with the surrounding territory covered about two thousand square kilometers. Florence was the city of great Renaissance artists and the cradle of humanistic education, where the ideals of Greek and Roman antiquity became accessible again. This meaning of the city was closely related to the rise of the Medici family, which was originally engaged in trade and entrepreneurship and which used its wealth both for the advancement of art and the acquisition of political power.
Behind the facade of the republican system, a family oligarchy was practically established. Machiavelli's fate was connected with the Medici in many ways. He matured primarily under the reign of Lorenzo Medici, known as the Magnificent, but a radical political change took place in Florence in his early youth. In 1492, Lorenzo Medici died, and two years later the Medici family lost power. The period begins in which the Dominican monk Girolamo Savanarola had a great influence on the city's politics.
Savanarola was a puritanical political fundamentalist. He stood for a democratic, but strictly religious and morally oriented order, in which there was no place for entertainment and silent pleasures. During Savanarola, pictures and books are burned. But in 1498 he himself was executed at the stake as a heretic.
It was the year in which the republican rule was consolidated in Florence and the year in which Niccolò Machiavelli entered politics.

The question arises whether it is better for people to love you or to fear you, or vice versa. The answer is: both would be desirable; but since it is difficult to combine these two, it is much safer, when a man must be without one of these two, that they fear you.

If you consider the way people act, you will see that all those who reach great wealth and great power have reached them either by fraud or by force.

Women are the most merciful, but also the most boring creatures in the world. Whoever avoids them, gets rid of accidents, and also benefits;
whoever hangs out with them, he has as many benefits as worries. It is true that there is no honey without flies.