The Education of a Christian Prince with the Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria Quotes

“It is the mark of a tyrant, indeed an underhand deception, to treat people at large the way that animal trainers customarily treat a wild beast; for their prime concern is to observe what pacifies it or what arouses it, and they provoke or soothe it to suit their own convenience.”
― Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince with the Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria

“How fleeting, how brief, how fragile is the life of a man, and how subject to misfortune, assailed already by a multitude of diseases and accidents, buildings which collapse, shipwrecks, earthquakes, lightning! We do not need to add war to our woes, and yet it causes more woe than all the others.”
― Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince with the Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria

“It is not the office that brings honour to the man, but the man to the office.”
― Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince with the Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria

“The tyrannical scheme of Dionysius of Syracuse has been justly censured; he passed a great many laws, piling one on top of another, but he is said to have allowed his people to ignore them and in this way to have made everyone beholden to him. That was not making laws, but setting traps.”
― Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince with the Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria

“What is a mistake in other people is a crime in the prince.”
― Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince with the Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria

“It is the most deplorable tribute when the succession of an inferior ruler turns his predecessor, who was intolerable while he lived, into someone whose integrity and goodness are sadly missed.”
― Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince with the Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria

“What a mockery it is to regard as slaves those whom Christ redeemed with the same blood as redeemed you”
― Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince with the Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria

“For Xenophon in his Oeconomicus rightly considers, that there is something beyond human nature, something wholly divine, in absolute rule over free and willing subjects.”
― Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince with the Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria

“What makes a prince a great man, except the consent of his subjects?”
― Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince with the Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria

“Not that I would want anyone to be forcibly deprived of his goods, but some system should be operated to prevent the wealth of the many from being allocated to the few.”
― Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince with the Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria