Word: machiavellis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...people know much about Machiavelli except that he sired the sinister adjective Machiavellian. Even those who know a little more differ widely about him. Some, like Ralph Roeder (The Man of the Renaissance), consider Machiavelli an Italian patriot and his Prince a kind of Mein Kampf of Italy's struggle for unity. Others, like Author Valeriu Marcu, consider Machiavelli a single-track political mind whose curious obsession with the pure mechanics of power is his first-class ticket to genius...
Even the Prince does not really settle these differences, since Machiavelli planted his ideas so diplomatically that readers expecting something diabolic in the book are sometimes disappointed. But since it came off the Vatican presses in 1532, politicians of all shades have found the Prince such a helpful manual of power, how to get and how to keep it, that it has shared their admiration with only one other book, von Clausewitz's On War. Napoleon called it "the only readable political book." Lenin told his Bolsheviks to read the Prince "as an antidote to stupidity...
...years after Columbus discovered America, Niccolo Machiavelli, younger son of an impoverished middle-class family of Florence, became a clerk in its government. For 14 years he sorted ambassadors' reports, paid secret agents, inspected fortresses and accounts. Sometimes the Signory sent Machiavelli on diplomatic missions. At the Vatican he began his firsthand study of power politics under such masters as Pope Alexander Borgia and his alleged son Cesare. Cesare Borgia was Machiavelli's model for the Prince...
...Daladier talked like a soldier of war and of the way to fight it. High-minded Chamberlain and grave Halifax, two Shakespearean characters in a tragic drama, spoke of right, of justice, of the moral problems of the conflict (see p. 27). Benito Mussolini, as befitted a student of Machiavelli, said little and made that little mean much or nothing (see p. 21). Harsh Molotov in Moscow jeered at hopeful democrats and alone of the world's spokesmen said nothing of war's misery-of which Adolf Hitler no less than Lenin showed himself fully conscious (TIME, Sept...
This morning at eleven, the Vagabond will hear Professor Whitney speak on Niccolo Machiavelli upstairs in Emerson Hall...