Lehal Library

What men and particularly rulers are praised and blamed for presumptuous: is going beyond what is right or proper because of an excess of self-confidence cheap It’s time to look at how a ruler should behave with his subjects and his friends. Given that a great deal has already been written about this, I fear people may find my contribution presumptuous, especially since, here more than elsewhere, the code of conduct I’m offering will be rather controversial. But since my aim was to write something useful for anyone interested, I felt it would be appropriate to go to the real truth of the matter, not to repeat other people’s fantasies. Many writers have dreamed up republics and kingdoms that bear no resemblance to experience and never existed in reality; there is such a gap between how people actually live and how they ought to live that anyone who declines to behave as people do, in order to behave as they should, is schooling himself for catastrophe and had better forget personal secur- ity: if you always want to play the good man in a world where most people are not good, you’ll end up badly. Hence, if a ruler wants to survive, he’ll have to learn to stop being good, at least when the occasion demands. So leaving aside things people have dreamed up about rulers and concentrating instead on reality, let’s say that when we talk about anyone, but especially about leaders, who are more exposed than others to the public eye, what we point are the qualities that prompt praise or blame. One man is thought generous and another miserly; one is seen as benevolent, kind another as grasping; one cruel, the other kind; one treacherous, traitorous greedy