Neville Figgis

It is the transformation of the desire to persecute into the claim of an inherent right to exist on the part of religious bodies that historically produces those limitations upon State actual which are the securities of freedom.

Jean Bodin is, next to Machiavelli, the most important political writer of the sixteenth century.

Lastly we come to the toleration of the Politiques. Their theory asserts definitely that the State is in fact indifferent to religious unity and gives up the entire attempt to identify Church with State, never abandoned in England till …

Machiavelli was always considering the practical problem, how is Italy to be saved?

Our generation has seen one further step taken in the extension of the principles of Machiavelli. The doctrines associated with the name of Nietzsche are exactly similar to those of Machiavelli, except that they are now purely limited to …

The gulf between the Christian ideal of Love, and the ideals of Buddha, Schopenhauer and Tolstoi, which mean the destruction of the individual, is at bottom irreconcilable; yet both by adversaries and believers, the mistake of confounding …

The despots of Italy were, in fact, in the Greek sense, tyrants, and Machiavelli did little more than say so. What gives him his importance is that what was true of the small despots of Italy was going to become true of the national …

It would be impossible to gain any adequate notion of the intellectual forces, that made up the mind of the average European statesman from 1600–1800 if we altogether omitted a consideration of the influence of Machiavelli.

The ideal of Christendom as a whole, with Pope and Emperor at its head, gave way to the notion of the godly prince; and potent in some respects as was Luther's nationalist influence, it was not so much the German people as the sovereign …

... the medieval mind conceived of its universal Church-State, with power ultimately fixed in the Spiritual head bounded by no territorial frontier; the Protestant mind places all ecclesiastical authority below the jurisdiction and subject …

How far are unjust laws to be obeyed? Need they be considered laws at all, if we understand St Thomas aright? Can any government exist or claim rights apart from the consent of the governed?

It is not to revive of the corpse of past erudition that I have any desire, but rather to make more vivid the life of to-day, and to help us to envisage its problems with a more accurate perspective.

If ideas in politics more than elsewhere are the children of practical needs, none the less is it true, that the actual world is the result of men's thoughts.