What Niccolò Machiavelli thinks about behavioural science
Florentine political philosopher and diplomat (1469 to 1527); Second Chancellor of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512; author of The Prince.
Niccolò Machiavelli did not write this page.
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2 dated positions, c. 1513–1514 to c. 1514–1519, in their own words. Our reading of what Niccolò Machiavelli has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsMen do always, but not always with reason, commend the past and condemn the present, and are so much the partisans of what has been, as not merely to cry up those times which are known to them only from the records left by historians, but also, when they grow old, to extol the days in which they remember their youth to have been spent.
↗Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius (Ninian Hill Thomson translation, 1883)gutenberg.org All 19 from this book
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Their wordsBut, it being my intention to write a thing which shall be useful to him who apprehends it, it appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of the matter than the imagination of it; for many have pictured republics and principalities which in fact have never been known or seen, because how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation; for a man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil.
↗The Prince (tr. W. K. Marriott, 1908)gutenberg.org All 6 from this book