1. Il Principe, ed. Arthur Burd, introduction by Lord Acton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), chapter 25, p. 358.
2. [Elsewhere, Machiavelli’s sentence has a slightly different appreciation: “A quaint quantitative estimate of the role of decision within the framework of necessity”; Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory. Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant & Mazzini, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 22–3. “We may take this careful statement … as earliest attempt at experientially based philosophy of I(nternational) P(olitics)”; Martin Wight, “Fortune and Irony in International Politics,” Chicago, March 13, 1957, MWP 3.]
3. Albert Sorel, La Question d’Orient au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: Plon 1889), 2nd. ed., p. 99. Cf. p. 77 and note. [“The more one gets older, he often said, the more one is persuaded that His Majesty the Chance makes three-quarters of the work of this miserable universe.”]
4. De Monarchia, II. 10, as translated by Donald Nicholl, Monarchy and Three Political Letters (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954), p. 53.
5. Donoso Cortes, “Lettres politiques sur la situation de la France en 1851 et 1852”, in Oeuvres (Paris: Vaton, 1858), II. 428. [“Moreover, these forecasts and all those of my previous letters can be deceived: all the calculations can be foiled by one of these coups d’état of Providence that common people call strokes of fortune. Everything I announced must happen, according to the natural order of things; but generally what must happen in this way does not happen. There is always a point of pernicious fever, an armed revolt, a bold stroke by an audacious man, a sudden change of opinion, which suddenly destroys the hopes of some, the fears of other, the wisdom of the wise, the ability of the skilled, the prudence of the prudent, and the calculations of all.”]