Machiavelli is not in the least utopian; he simply thinks the conjunctural case of the thing, and goes dietro alla verità effettuale della cosa. He asserts it in concepts which are philosophical and no doubt make him, in his temerity, solitude and scorn for the philosophers of the tradition, the greatest materialist philosopher in history – the equal of Spinoza, who declared him "acutissimus', most acute. Spinoza considered him acutissimus in politics. He would appear not to have suspected that Machiavelli was also most incisive in materialist philosophy.

Religion is for Machiavelli utterly necessary to found, preserve, and reform good political orders. He stated this view in the most unequivocal manner. At the same time he knew very well that the only available religion was the Christian. Had he believed and argued that Christian religion was in its essence and hopelessly inimical to good political orders and above all to republican liberty he would have been compelled to also believe and argue that good political orders and republican liberty were impossible for the moderns in general and for the Italians in particular, a conclusion that he never entertained. Instead, he believed in, and suggested, the possibility of a civic interpretation of Christianity similar to the one that he knew existed in his Florence.

The idea that the ends of government justify the means employed, was worked into system by Machiavelli. He was an acute politician, sincerely anxious that the obstacles to the intelligent government of Italy should be swept away. It appeared to him that the most vexatious obstacle to intellect is conscience, and that the vigorous use of statecraft necessary for the success of difficult schemes would never be made if governments allowed themselves to be hampered by the precepts of the copy-book. His audacious doctrine was avowed in the succeeding age, by men whose personal character otherwise stood high. They saw that in critical times good men have seldom strength for their goodness, and yield to those who have grasped the meaning of the maxim that you cannot make an omelette if you are afraid to break the eggs. They saw that public morality differs from private, because no government can turn the other cheek, or can admit that mercy is better than justice. And they could not define the difference, or draw the limits of exception; or tell what other standard for a nation’s acts there is than the judgment which heaven pronounces in this world by success.

There is really very little of Machiavelli's one can accept or use in the contemporary world. The one thing I find interesting in Machiavelli is his estimate of the prince's will. Interesting, but not such as to influence me. If you want to know who has influenced me most, I'll answer with two philosophers' names: Spinoza and Kant. Which makes it all the more peculiar that you choose to associate me with Machiavelli.

When Machiavelli advises the Prince to carry out the Machiavellian scheme of action, he invests those actions with no sort of morality or beauty. For him morality remains what it is for everyone else, and does not cease to remain so because he observes (not without melancholy) that it is incompatible with politics. … For him evil, even if it aids politics, still remains evil. The modern realists are the moralists of realism. For them, the act which makes the State strong is invested with a moral character by the fact that it does so, and this whatever the act may be. The evil which serves politics ceases to be evil and becomes good.

While there may exist no more than the normal extent of disagreement about the meaning of particular terms or theses contained in these works, there is a startling degree of divergence about the central view, the basic political attitude of Machiavelli.

The academic politician is interested in victory. He has the moral code of Machiavelli, but, because he is too impatient to submit to the instruction of history, he has not the old master’s shrewd sense of human limitations and contradictions. He makes the worst of rulers: he is neither a lover of truth, nor a practical man of the world, nor an habitual examiner of his all-too-human and persistent failings.

We cannot overestimate the change in men's minds required to produce the ideal of heterogeneity in religion within one State.
... In the Middle Ages politics was a branch of Theology, with whatever admixture derived from Aristotle and the Civil Law. Its basis was theocratic. Machiavelli represents the antithesis of this view, discarding ethical and rural as well as theological Criteria of State action.

What has been shown by Machiavelli, who is often (like Nietzsche) congratulated for tearing off hypocritical masks, brutally revealing the truth, and so on, is not that men profess one thing and do another (although no doubt he shows this too) but that when they assume that the two ideals are compatible, or perhaps are even one and the same ideal, and do not allow this assumption to be questioned, they are guilty of bad faith (as the existentialists call it, or of “false consciousness,” to use a Marxist formula) which their actual behavior exhibits. Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality—the hypocrisies of ordinary life—but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values. His own withers are unwrung. He has made his choice. He seems wholly unworried by, indeed scarcely aware of, parting company with traditional Western morality.

It would be impossible to gain any adequate notion of the intellectual forces, that made up the mind of the average European statesman from 1600–1800 if we altogether omitted a consideration of the influence of Machiavelli.

Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they are. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He knew (in words Kant would write almost three centuries later) that nothing straight would be made from the crooked timber of humanity.

Machiavelli is not concerned with how men do live merely in order to describe it; his intention is rather, on the basis of knowledge of how men do live, to teach princes how they ought to rule and even how they ought to live.

Four centuries ago, Machiavelli was thinking of certain great problems of human society and writing two famous books. In so doing he reached scientific generalizations about the influence of the sentiments upon the actions of men and, through these actions, upon the fate of human societies. As a whole, these conclusions stand; but from this great and ingenious work of Machiavelli's almost no developments have followed. The science of statecraft and of the influence of the sentiments upon human behavior is little different to-day from what it was in in the 16th century.

This idea of the state as a force (which as a result of the current general state of ignorance is seen as a German Prussian idea) is plainly a Latin and Italian one. It is directly linked with the intellectual tradition of Rome and was refurbished by Machiavelli’s political philosophy.