“When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely.”

—  Niccolo Machiavelli

Letter to Francesco Vettori http://www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/flor-mach-lett-vettori.htm (10 December 1513), in James Atkinson (trans.), Prince Machiavelli (1976), p. 19

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Niccolo Machiavelli130
Italian politician, Writer and Author 1469–1527

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