"For as laws are necessary that good..." - Quote by Niccolo Machiavelli

“A son could bear with great complacency, the death of his father, while the loss of his inheritance might drive him to despair.”

“Knowing how to fight made men more bold, because no one fears doing what it seems to him he has learned to do. Therefore, the ancients wanted their citizens to be trained in every warlike action.”

“The new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once and for all.”

“The law is an ass, an idiot.”

“There are other places at which ... the laws have said there shall be towns; but Nature has said there shall not, and they remain unworthy of enumeration.”

“Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results … We understand this law in the natural world, and work with it; but few understand it in the mental and moral world—although its operation there is just as simple and undeviating— and they, therefore, do not cooperate with it.”

“There is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”

“How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden.”

“Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class-the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn't want you to know something, it won't be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.”