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Though his conversations arose from the particular events he lived through, they address questions that stir as much heated discussion today as they did five hundred years ago. Why are people so easily taken in by misleading rhetoric and good appearances? What’s the point of education? Why should winners care about justice? What is true greatness? When should you fight to the death for your beliefs, and when should you stop fighting? How can people be free in a world dominated by a few great powers and by gross inequalities?
nothing is less prudent than to get a name for bad faith; and nothing sets a worse example in public life,
Nothing is stupider than to sink to the level of mindlessly competitive men in hopes of beating them. You might win, but you end up as mindless as they are. Before long, someone slightly less stupid will beat you.
people who don’t trust their own judgement make bad defenders of freedom; they rush too quickly into the arms of power-greedy men who are all too happy to judge things for them.
In all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same humours, and there always have been. It should therefore be easy for anyone who examines past things diligently to foresee future things in every republic, and to take the remedies for them that were used by the ancients. But since most readers and those who govern fail to see the same patterns of behaviour in different times, always imagining that their times and problems are unique, it follows that there are always the same scandals in every time.
beware, Florentines and readers everywhere, of placing too much hope in any one man, especially one who leads more by private wealth and charisma than by laws and prudent restraint.
When Niccolò calls the Pitti Palace splendid and royal, he is not expressing awestruck admiration; on the contrary, he implies that Pitti had regal aspirations that were wholly inappropriate in a republic.
The struggle to overcome great difficulties teaches people self-discipline and self-knowledge, not least knowledge of their own resources of mind and spirit, which might go untapped if they had it easy. This makes them tougher than those who have too many hereditary advantages: they are thicker-skinned against those who try to pull them down, more tolerant of the setbacks that face everyone at some time or another.
Niccolò reminds us, there are three kinds of brains: one that understands by itself, another that discerns what others understand, the third that understands neither by itself nor through others. The first is most excellent, the second excellent, and the third useless.
You think wealthy people help pull the poor up with alms and private charities? Think again. The ambitious projects of the rich impoverish the poor even more. Your great men buy land and shops from the poor at a low price, taking advantage of others’ poverty to aggrandize themselves in vain shows of extravagance. The devil uses the great to oppress the poor so the poor can’t do good.
But history teaches us that the populace lacks the discretion needed to choose wise men over ignorant ones, or good policies over bad. And at this moment, when our city is so weak, it would be folly to put ourselves in the hands of those who have the least skill.’
it’s wisest to presuppose that all men are bad, and that they always use the malignity of their spirit whenever they have the opportunity.10
That is why prudent founders have built strong checks on human badness into their constitutions.
The only hope for managing such strife is for members of every party and sect to obey the same laws and apply them impartially. If a law is generally useful, it ought to be applied in every case without exception.
‘the bad comrades’, launch a battle to reconquer Carnival for the pagans.31 Parades of cross-bearing children are joined by men in outrageous drag who howl: ‘Carnival is forced to flee the city where everyone has become a friar!’
He splits the whole city into the good and the wicked, into angels and demons, locked in a holy and potentially deadly struggle for the city’s soul. Now that he’s declared open war, what room is there for seeking common ground? It’s us against them,
When she was twenty, and seven months pregnant, she had donned full military armour and crossed the Tiber on horseback, commanding her husband Girolamo Riario’s troops to occupy the papal fortress of Castel Sant’ Angelo.
One needs to be a fox to recognize snares, and a lion to frighten the wolves.
But fraud aimed at taking advantage of others is a distinctively human talent. Real foxes, the ones with fur and tail, have nothing to teach men about lying or cheating, even to trap their small prey.
When people say a man is fortunate, they mean that good things happen to him regardless of his own merits or plans. Fortune is sheer arbitrariness: it is the good or the bad that people experience without deserving one or the other.
Pope Borgia goes unmourned, even in the Vatican. According to the papal notary, neither priests nor anyone else attended to his body, and a gang of labourers cracked blasphemous jokes about the deceased as they pummelled his bloated, discoloured corpse into the coffin.
these blows from Fortune have stunned him and, since he is unaccustomed to receive them, his mind is addled. Another cardinal said he believed the duke out of his mind, confused and irresolute.
They tried to block the flow of supplies to Pisa by pouring vast amounts of money into a project aimed at changing the course of the Arno River, inviting all the best engineering brains in Italy to propose designs; Leonardo da Vinci was among those who entered but failed to win the competition.
These people say, as at times Vettori comes close to saying: give up your republican fantasies, your dreams of early Rome before inequality and ambition corrupted that city. Embrace the present reality.
