Proof of great prudence

 

Don't quote me on this, but sometimes I think the world might be a better place if more people studied Machiavelli. 

OK, not so much the advice about how a prince who came to power by unusual means might need to seem to be good while doing nasty things. Or the whole means/ends thing.  But there was a lot more to him than that. 

I don't know of any other author who wrote so clearly about the role of fortune in human life and the need to be ready when the floods come, the difficulty in enacting major reforms, and much more.

He was also a supporter of small-r republican government in his home city of Florence and was even tortured for it. The 18th century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau said of him that "Whilst pretending to teach lessons to kings, he taught great lessons to the people."

The particular nugget of his that's on my mind these days has showed up here before, but it seems particularly timely advice these days to some major struggles in progress:

"I hold it to be proof of great prudence for men [sic] to abstain from threats and insulting words towards anyone, for neither the one nor the other in any way diminishes the strength of the enemy; but the one makes him cautious, and the other increases his hatred of you, and makes him more persevering in his efforts to injure you."