More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
A ruler who inherits power has less reason or need to upset his subjects than a new one and as a result is better loved.
Its subjects will be happy that they can appeal to a ruler who is living among them. So, if they’re intending to be obedient, they’ll have one more reason to love you, and if they’re not, all the more reason to fear you.
you must either pamper people or destroy them; harm them just a little and they’ll hit back; harm them seriously and they won’t be able to.
The Romans followed these principles whenever they took a new province: they sent colonists; they established friendly relations with weaker neighbours, though without allowing them to increase their power; they undermined stronger neighbours and they prevented powerful rulers outside the region from gaining influence there.
Seen in advance, trouble is easily dealt with; wait until it’s on top of you and your reaction will come too late, the malaise is already irreversible.
The desire to conquer more territory really is a very natural, ordinary thing and whenever men have the resources to do so they’ll always be praised, or at least not blamed.
you must never fail to respond to trouble just to avoid war, because in the end you won’t avoid it, you’ll just be putting it off to your enemy’s advantage.
that to help another ruler to grow powerful is to prepare your own ruin;
there are three ways of holding on to them: the first is to reduce them to rubble; the second is to go and live there yourself; the third is to let them go on living under their own laws, make them pay you a tax and install a government of just a few local people to keep the state as a whole friendly.
The truth is that the only sure way to hold such places is to destroy them. If you conquer a city accustomed to self-government and opt not to destroy it you can expect it to destroy you.
no one really believes in change until they’ve had solid experience of it.
It’s easy to convince people of something, but hard to keep them convinced. So when they stop believing in you, you must be in a position to force them to believe.
Like anything that appears suddenly and grows fast, regimes that come out of nothing inevitably have shallow roots and will tend to crash in the first storm.
Anyone who thinks that an important man will forget past grievances just because he’s received some new promotion must think again.
