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Niccolo Machiavelli
b. 5-3-1469; Florence, Italy
d. 6-21-1527
Civil servant, philosopher, musician, and playwright Niccolo Machiavelli is considered one of the main founders of modern political science.
Niccolo Machiavelli quotes ~
• “Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.”
• “Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.”
• “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”
• “Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.”
• “One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.”
• “Politics have no relation to morals.”
• “The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”
• “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
• The Art of War & The Prince by Machiavelli
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George Macdonald
b. 12-10-1824; Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland
d. 9-18-1905; Ashtead, Surrey, England
Author, poet, and Christian minister George MacDonald is best remembered for his fairy tales and fantasy novels. His best-known works are Phantastes, The Princess and the Goblin, At the Back of the North Wind, and Lilith, all fantasy novels, and fairy tales such as “The Light Princess”, “The Golden Key”, and “The Wise Woman”.
His work is considered of the “Kailyard school”, a genre of Scottish literature portrays an overly setimental representation of rural life; the word derives meaning from the small cabbage or kitchen garden that was typically found next to a cottage. J. M. Barrie was Kailyard school writer.
Macdonald was also inspiration to many other famous writers such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, E. Nesbit and Madeleine L'Engle, and encouraged the author known as Lewis Carroll to publish his Alice in Wonderland.
George Macdonald quotes ~
• “I write, not for children but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”
• “Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.”
• “Attitudes are more important than facts.”
• “It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.”
• “To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.”
• “You can't live on amusement. It is the froth on water - an inch deep and then the mud.”
• The Complete Fairy Tales of George MacDonald
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Archibald MacLeisch
b. 5-7-1892; Glencoe, IL
d. 4-20-1982; Boston
Poet, writer and the Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish was associated with the Modernist school of poetry; he also received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
Archibald MacLeish quotes ~
• “A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.”
• “Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.”
• “Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.”
• “The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”
• “What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.”
• Archibald Macleish: Reflections
• Archibald MacLeish: Collected Poems 1917 to 1982
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Maurice Maeterlinck
b. 8-29-1862; Ghent, Belgium
d. 5-6-1949; Nice, France
Maurice Maeterlinck, a poet, dramatist, and essayist who wrote in French, was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize in Literature “in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers' own feelings and stimulate their imaginations.” The main themes in Maeterlinck's work are death and the meaning of life, and his plays form an important part of the Symbolist movement.
Maurice Maeterlinck quotes ~
• “Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?”
• “All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.”
• “No great inner event befalls those who summon it not.”
• “Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?”
• The Great Secret: Life's Meaning as Revealed Through Ancient, Hidden Traditions
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Norman Mailer
b. 1-31-1923; Long Branch, NY
d. 11-10-2007
Norman Mailer was novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter and film director. He is considered one of the founders of “New Journalism” a literary genre of newswriting that includes reporting, ‘modern muckraking’, advocacy journalism, underground journalism and precision journalism”.
Norman Mailer quotes ~
• “Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.”
• “America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.”
• “If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.”
• “Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.”
• “We can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.”
• Norman Mailer at Amazon
• East Village Guide Map Posters
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