Quotes from Nicollo Machiavelli

When every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove elsewhere, every region being equally crowded and over-peopled, and when human craft and wickedness have reached their highest pitch, it must needs come about that the world will purge herself in one or another of these three ways: floods, plague and famine

No one should ever allow himself to fall down in the belief that someone else will lift him to his feet because it will not happen; or if it does happen it will not prove to his advantage.