Life & Wisdom Quote by Niccolo Machiavelli

Machiavelli is slicing up the comforting fables people tell about success. If an achievement comes from neither fortune nor virtue, he argues, don’t dress it up in noble causality or shrug it off as luck. That refusal to mislabel outcomes is pure Machiavellian craft: he’s policing the language of power so it can’t be used as moral perfume.

The line is designed to puncture two popular alibis. “Fortune” is the ancient escape hatch for rulers who want to seem chosen by history rather than responsible for what they’ve done. “Virtue,” in Machiavelli’s Italian, isn’t Christian goodness so much as capacity: nerve, competence, strategic intelligence. By excluding both, he forces a third category into view: achievements produced by mechanisms that are neither random nor admirable. Think coercion, manipulation, inherited position, bureaucratic momentum, or simple opportunism. The subtext is bracing: sometimes things happen because someone exploited a system, not because the universe smiled or because character triumphed.

Context matters. Writing in a fragmented, violently competitive Italy, Machiavelli watched city-states rise and fall on alliances, betrayals, mercenaries, and spectacle. He’s not interested in the courtly habit of turning every victory into either divine favor or moral reward. He wants a reader - especially a prince - who can diagnose causation accurately, because misdiagnosis invites repetition. Call naked power “virtue,” and you’ll mistake brutality for skill. Call it “fortune,” and you’ll wait for the dice to roll again instead of building leverage.