"Fear is secured by a dread of..." - Quote by Niccolo Machiavelli

“Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.”

“And here one must not that hatred is acquired just as much by means of good actions as by bad ones; and so, as I said above, if a prince wishes to maintain the state, he is often obliged not to be good; because whenever that group which you believe you need to support you is corrupted, whether it be the common people, the soldiers, or the nobles, it is to your advantage to follow their inclinations in order to satisfy them; and then good actions are your enemy.”

“There are three kinds of minds: first those that attain insight and understanding of things by their own means, then those that recognize what is right when others explain it to them, and finally those that are capable of neither one nor the other.”

“The cutting of heads is become so much a la mode, that one is apt to feel of a morning whether their own is on their shoulders.”

“Life in the world... was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder. The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown.”

“No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.”

“Happiness is a warm gun.”

“Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.”

“Do not give in too much to feelings. A overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky earth.”