Sublime

Where society has acquired a sufficient degree of stability to enable it to hold certain maxims and to retain fixed habits, the lower orders are accustomed to respect intellectual superiority and to submit to it without complaint, although they set at naught all those privileges which wealth and birth have introduced among mankind.

whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

Sometime within the next few decades, the new megapolitics of the Information Age will antiquate The Prince. The Sovereign Individual will require a new recipe for success, one which will highly emphasize honor and rectitude in deploying resources outside the grip of the state.

The wealthy individual, on the contrary, always escapes imprisonment in civil causes; nay, more, he may readily elude the punishment which awaits him for a delinquency by breaking his bail. So that all the penalties of the law are, for him, reducible to fines. *n Nothing can be more aristocratic than this system of legislation.

That which was experimental in our plan of government was the question whether democratic rule could be so organized and conducted that it would not degenerate into license and result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the power so often found necessary of repressing or destroying their enemy, when he was found in the person

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Je vois le danger de ces armées civiles : il tient en un mot : l'établissement de routines. Ces rouages montés pour des siècles se fausseront si l'on n'y prend garde ; c'est au maître à en régler sans cesse les mouvements, à en prévoir ou à en réparer l'usure. Mais l'expérience démontre qu'en dépit de nos soins infinis pour choisir nos successeurs,

The second manner of diminishing the influence of authority does not consist in stripping society of any of its rights, nor in paralyzing its efforts, but in distributing the exercise of its privileges in various hands, and in multiplying functionaries, to each of whom the degree of power necessary for him to perform his duty is entrusted.

shattering certainty, Machiavelli showed how. “[T]he dilemma has never given men peace since it came to light,” Berlin lightly concludes, “but we have learnt to live with it.”78