“The best possible fortress is—not to be hated by the people.”
Variant: Variant translation: The best fortress which a prince can possess is the affection of his people.
Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 20: 'Are fortresses, and many other things to which princes often resort advantageous or hurtful?'
Original
La migliore fortezza che sia, è non essere odiato da' popoli.
The Prince (1513)
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Niccolo Machiavelli 130
Italian politician, Writer and Author 1469–1527Related quotes
“You know your the best when people you don't know hate you.”
“Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small.”
John Hale
The Crucible (1953)
About the fortress Igi-hursaja.
Correspondence of the Kings of Ur, Letter from Shulgi to Puzur-Shulgi about work on the fortress Igi-hursanga http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section3/tr3108.htm
“Hating requires caring. In which case, I couldn't possibly hate you.”
Source: Blue Moon
“There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot storm.”
Clive Foss, The Tyrants: 2500 Years of Absolute Power and Corruption, London: Quercus Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1905204965 , p. 131
Contemporary witnesses
From Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1 (1947/1991)
Context: Everything great and splendid is founded on power and wealth. They are the basis of beauty. This is why the rebel and the anarchic protester who decries all of history and all the works of past centuries because he sees in them only the skills and the threat of domination is making a mistake. He sees alienated forms, but not the greatness within. The rebel can only see to the end of his own ‘private’ consciousness, which he levels against everything human, confusing the oppressors with the oppressed masses, who were nevertheless the basis and the meaning of history and past works. Castles, palaces, cathedrals, fortresses, all speak in their various ways of the greatness and the strength of the people who built them and against whom they were built. This real greatness shines through the fake grandeur of rulers and endows these buildings with a lasting ‘beauty’. The bourgeoisie is alone in having given its buildings a single, over-obvious meaning, impoverished, deprived of reality: that meaning is abstract wealth and brutal domination; that is why it has succeeded in producing perfect ugliness and perfect vulgarity. The man who denigrates the past, and who nearly always denigrates the present and the future as well, cannot understand this dialectic of art, this dual character of works and of history. He does not even sense it. Protesting against bourgeois stupidity and oppression, the anarchic individualist is enclosed in ‘private’ consciousness, itself a product of the bourgeois era, and no longer understands human power and the community upon which that power is founded. The historical forms of this community, from the village to the nation, escape him. He is, and only wants to be, a human atom (in the scientifically archaic sense of the word, where ‘atom’ meant the lowest isolatable reality). By following alienation to its very extremes he is merely playing into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Embryonic and unconscious, this kind of anarchism is very widespread. There is a kind of revolt, a kind of criticism of life, that implies and results in the acceptance of this life as the only one possible. As a direct consequence this attitude precludes any understanding of what is humanly possible.
Book II : Chapter 11. The Fracas at the Theatre Feydau
Scaramouche (1921)
Speech delivered in Birmingham, Alabama, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, 27 October 1921, p. 2.
1920s