It is necessary to whoever disposes a republic and orders laws in it to presuppose that all men are bad, and that they always have to use the malignity of their spirit whenever they have a free opportunity for it.
È necessario a chi dispone una repubblica, ed ordina leggi in quella, presupporre tutti gli uomini essere cattivi, e che gli abbiano sempre ad usare la malignità dell'animo loro, qualunque volta ne abbiano libera occasione.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, June 07, 2021
A Necessary Presupposition
Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy I.3.1 (tr. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov):