The 33 Strategies Of War (The Modern Machiavellian Robert Greene Book 1)

by Robert Greene

Chaos—where brilliant dreams are born.

as children and young adults, we are taught to conform to certain codes of behavior and ways of doing things. We learn that being different comes with a social price.

emotional people are vulnerable people over whom you can easily exert power.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

It is when the tide is against us that we must forget the books, the precedents, the conventional wisdom, and risk everything on the untried and unexpected.

An ordinary appearance spiced by a touch of divine madness is more shocking and alarming than an out-and-out crazy person.

What will truly shock and linger long in the mind are those works and ideas that grow out of the soil of the ordinary and banal, that are unexpected, that make us question and contest the very nature of the reality we see around us. Most definitely in art, the unconventional can only be strategic.

When you yourself come under moral attack from a clever enemy, do not whine or get angry; fight fire with fire. If possible, position yourself as the underdog, the victim, the martyr. Learn to inflict guilt as a moral weapon.

It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral.

whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat.

To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.

Successful wickedness hath obtained the name virtue . . . when it is for the getting of the kingdom.

Avoid wars of morality if you can; they are not worth the time and dirty feelings they churn up.

Moral battles are for public consumption, and you must constantly gauge their effect, lowering or raising the heat accordingly.

first, your rivals harbor the seeds of their own self-destruction, and second, a rival who is made to feel defensive and inferior, however subtly, will tend to act defensive and inferior, to his or her detriment.