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Machiavelli even encourages risk taking as a reaction to risk. In a well-known metaphor, Machiavelli writes that "it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman; and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her down."
This proposal that leaders can overcome the arbiter of all things is a common theme in Machiavelli's better known political works such as The Prince. By treating Castracani as a founder, almost, of a new state, Machiavelli used him as an example of the most important type of prince according to his other writings.
For example, Machiavelli viewed misery as "one of the vices that enables a prince to rule." [77] Machiavelli stated that "it would be best to be both loved and feared. But since the two rarely come together, anyone compelled to choose will find greater security in being feared than in being loved."
Machiavelli concludes that "Two things are to be considered here: one, that one has to seek glory in a corrupt city by modes other than in one that still lives politically; the other (which is almost the same as the first), that men in their proceedings—and so much the more in great actions—should consider the times and accommodate ...
Thoughts on Machiavelli is a book by Leo Strauss first published in 1958. The book is a collection of lectures he gave at the University of Chicago in which he dissects the work of Niccolò Machiavelli. The book contains commentary on Machiavelli's The Prince and the Discourses on Livy. [1]
According to this tradition, "evil, though real, is not a 'thing', but rather a direction away from the goodness of the One"; [11] evil is the absence of good, and accordingly, it is technically wrong to say that God created evil, properly speaking. Rather, he created a world which was imperfectly good.
At the beginning stages of spiritual growth, good and evil may seem neatly separated. However, once one's spirit evolves to the point where it sees most clearly, the idea of evil vanishes and the truth is revealed. In his writings Guru Arjan explains that, because God is the source of all things, what we believe to be evil must too come from ...
Chapter 3.6 quotes Tacitus: "men have to honor things past but obey the present, and ought to desire good Princes, but tolerate the ones they have". 3.19 twists a line from Tacitus into something very similar to Machiavelli's famous maxim that it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. (The original made a very different point: that ...