Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes

Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos.

Chaos is the first condition. Order is the first law. Continuity is the first reflection. Quietude is the first happiness.

Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.

It is thus tolerance that is the source of peace, and intolerance that is the source of disorder and squabbling.

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

What would happen if we withdrew? Anarchy and confusion.

Whoever triumphs, the result of the present upheaval will doubtless be to keep the yoke of militarism as firmly as ever on the neck of the people of China. As Europe has learned to its sorrow, it is possible to win the war and lose the peace, so China is beginning to understand that that blessed word democracy does not mean peace, and that prosperity and order are not necessary corollaries of a successful revolution and a republican form of government.

There is no instant step from disorder to order.

The two parties represent two opposite moods of the English mind, which may be trusted, unless past experience is wholly useless, to succeed each other from time to time. Neither of them, neither the love of organic changes nor the dislike of it, can be described as normal to a nation. In every nation, they have succeeded each other at varying intervals during the whole of the period which separates its birth from its decay. Each finds in the circumstances and constitution of individuals a regular support which never deserts it. Among men, the old, the phlegmatic, the sober-minded, among classes, those who have more to lose than to gain by change, furnish the natural Conservatives. The young, the envious, the restless, the dreaming, those whose condition cannot easily be made worse, will be rerum novarum cupidi. But the two camps together will not nearly include the nation: for the vast mass of every nation is unpolitical.

Nothing will make a place feel unlike home like chaos.

When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder).

Without doubt, ferocious and disordered men are much weaker than timid and ordered ones. For order chases fear from men and disorder lessens ferocity.

And so long as they were at war, their power was preserved, but when they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing, and had never engaged in any employment higher than war.

I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature, which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered; and the easier repaired when disordered.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

I am confirmed in my belief that war is utter destructive violent chaos. There is no "art," no "order(s)," no "just war." No matter what the ideologies, wars are the same.

When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos - as it does for a dog.

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

Margaret Kochamma's tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.

The laws of Nature, that is to say the laws of God, plainly made every human being a law unto himself, we must steadfastly refuse to obey those laws, and we must as steadfastly stand by the conventions which ignore them, since the statutes furnish us peace, fairly good government, and stability, and therefore are better for us than the laws of God, which would soon plunge us into confusion and disorder and anarchy if we should adopt them.

Progress comes by experiment, and this from ennui that leads to voyages, wars, revolutions, and plainly to change in the arts of expression; that cries out to the imagination, and is the nurse of the invention whereof we term necessity the mother.

Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.

Sometimes I think I've figured out some order in the universe, but then I find myself in Florida

The present order is the disorder of the future.