"The most stormy ebullitions of passion, from blasphemy to murder, are less terrific than one single act of cool villainy."

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The most superficial fact regarding the 'Discourses,' the fact that the number of its chapters equals the number of books of Livy's 'History,' compelled us to start a chain of tentative reasoning which brings us suddenly face to face with the only New Testament quotation that ever appears in Machiavelli's two books and with an enormous blasphemy.

— Leo Strauss