A sculptor will more easily extract a beautiful statue from a piece of rough marble than from one that has been badly blocked out by someone else. - Niccolò Machiavelli

Whether this has ever happened I know not, nor whether it ever can happen. For we see, as I have said a little way back, that a city which owing to its pervading corruption has once begun to decline, if it is to recover at all, must be saved not by the excellence of the people collectively, but of some one man then living among them, on whose death it at once relapses into its former plight; as happened with Thebes, in which the virtue of Epaminondas made it possible while he lived to preserve the form of a free Government, but which fell again on his death into its old disorders; the reason being that hardly any ruler lives so long as to have time to accustom to right methods a city which has long been accustomed to wrong.

As a general thing anyone who is not your friend will advise neutrality while anyone who is your friend will ask you to join him, weapon in hand.

Prudence therefore consists in knowing how to distinguish degrees of disadvantage, and in accepting a less evil as a good.