“It is enough to ask somebody for his weapons without saying 'I want to kill you with them', because when you have his weapons in hand, you can satisfy your desire.”
Book 1, Ch 44 (as translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella)
Discourses on Livy (1517)
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Niccolo Machiavelli 130
Italian politician, Writer and Author 1469–1527Related quotes
On Humour.
I Don't Know One Editor In India Who Is Well-Read
“You can figure out what the villain fears by his choice of weapons.”
Source: The Bridal Season
“A newspaper is always a weapon in somebody's hands.”
Page 220
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)
As quoted in The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb (1981), a documentary film directed by Jon Else, written by David Peoples, Janet Peoples, and Jon Else.
Context: I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.
"I'm starting to think we have a problematic issue of personal philosophy here."
Jordan Kyle and Jace Herondale, pg. 27-29
The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)
At a Labour Party conference in the UK, quoted in The Independent. "Clinton urges caution over Iraq as Bush is granted war powers" (3 October 2002) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/clinton-urges-caution-over-iraq-as-bush-is-granted-war-powers-607775.html
2000s
Context: A preemptive action today, however well-justified, may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future. And because … I've done this. I've ordered these kinds of actions — I don't care how precise your bombs and your weapons are, when you set them off, innocent people will die.