“It is best to keep men poor and on a permanent war footing, for this will be an antidote to the two great enemies of obedience—ambition and boredom—and the ruled will then feel in constant need of great men to lead them (the twentieth century offers us only too much evidence for this sharp insight).”

-Isaiah Berlin paraphrasing Machiavelli’s The Prince, in The New York Review of Books (Nov. 1971).

[h/t Paul Fidalgo]