Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries - for heavy ones they cannot. - Niccolò Machiavelli

When trouble is sensed well in advance it can easily be remedied; if you wait for it to show itself any medicine will be too late because the disease will have become incurable. As the doctors say of a wasting disease, to start with it is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose;after a time, unless it has been diagnosed and treated at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. So it is in politics.

...the manner in which we live, and that in which we ought to live, are things so wide asunder, that he who quits the one to betake himself to the other is more likely to destroy than to save himself; since any one who would act up to a perfect standard of goodness in everything, must be ruined among so many who are not good.

Virtue gives birth to tranquillity, tranquillity to leisure, leisure to disorder, disorder to ruin... and similarly from ruin, order is born, from order virtue, from virtue, glory and good fortune.