Just a Girl from the North

So is Machiavelli a genius or just downright absurd? His opinions are drastic, but somehow correct in their interpretation. Would it be better to be loved or feared? Most of the time, your first answer is obviously to be loved, because who doesn’t want to be loved? However, Machiavelli would disagree with being loved. He finds it more effective to be feared. He states on page 66, “From this a dispute arises whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The response is that one would want to be both the one and the other; but because it is difficult to put them together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one has to lack one of the two.” In this passage, Machiavelli says it is safer to be feared. Initially, I disagreed with this because, if you have people loving you, you automatically have people on your side. These people that love you will support you as prince and will have your back. However, reading later on in the passage, he makes the valid point of ho...

You should never judge a book by its cover. Though this may seem obvious, everyone struggles with this, including me, on the daily. We’re all human, we can’t help it. When it comes down to it, however, you find the real character of a person on the inside. Physical interaction can be deceptive. There is the most common example in the world of the ugly person but the beautiful soul. I think that it is especially important to have this mindset going into meeting anyone new and getting to know them. Praise of Folly really emphasizes this obvious point of getting to know someone before judging their character. Folly makes it appear quite obvious the easiest way to get to know someone. Folly expresses her opinion on pages 12 and 13 saying, “But was there any need to tell you even as much as that, as if I didn’t make it perfectly clear who I am from the look on my face, as they say? Anyone who argued that I was Minerva or Wisdom could easily be convinced of his mistake simply by the sig...