“The Florentines, who were incapable of ruling themselves, produced a great theorist of government: Machiavelli. The Venetians had no theorists and evolved a model Republic.”

Source: Venice Observed (1956), Ch. 6

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The Florentines, who were incapable of ruling themselves, produced a great theorist of government: Machiavelli. The Ven…" by Mary McCarthy?
Mary McCarthy photo
Mary McCarthy 79
American writer 1912–1989

Related quotes

Samuel Butler photo

“The composer is seldom a great theorist; the theorist is never a great composer. Each is equally fatal to and essential in the other.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Action and Study
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting

Will Durant photo
James Meade photo

“He was lucky enough to rub shoulders with a fellow student, Mr. W T. Newlyn, now lecturing on money at the University of Leeds, who was less of an engineer but more of a monetary theorist than himself. Together they discussed how monetary theory could be represented by an hydraulic model.”

James Meade (1907–1995) British economist

Source: The balance of payments, 1951, p. 10; As cited in: Mary S. Morgan (2012) The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think, p. 194

François de La Rochefoucauld photo

“Those who apply themselves too much to little things often become incapable of great ones.”

Ceux qui s'appliquent trop aux petites choses deviennent ordinairement incapables des grandes.
Maxim 41.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Milton Friedman photo

“The elementary truth is that the Great Depression was produced by government mismanagement. It was not produced by the failure of private enterprise, it was produced by the failure of government to perform a function which had been assigned to it.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

" Economic Myths and Public Opinion https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collections/2016c21/AmSpectator_01_1976.pdf” The Alternative: An American Spectator vol. 9, no. 4, (January 1976) pp. 5-9, Reprinted in Bright Promises, Dismal Performance: An Economist’s Protest, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1983) pp. 60-75

Gerald Ford photo

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.
Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

1970s, First Presidential address (1974)
Context: My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.
Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher Power, by whatever name we honor Him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.
As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate.

Victor Davis Hanson photo

Related topics