Written in forced retirement after prison and torture, a short manual on acquiring and keeping states that changed political thought by a single decision: to describe how power actually works rather than how it ought to. Its notorious counsels — that it is safer to be feared than loved, that a ruler must learn how not to be good — are the price of taking the world as it is.
Since it is difficult to combine them, it is far safer to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both. For this may be said of men generally: they are ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, eager to escape danger, and greedy for gain. But a prince must make himself feared in such a way that, if he does not win love, he escapes hatred.
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