:"Every one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft. Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word....But it is necessary to know well how to disguise this characteristic....Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them."<ref>''The Prince'' ch. 18</ref>
Machiavelli uses "virtù" to refer to the range of personal qualities, such as ruthlessness and the flexibility to rapidly respond to changing circumstances regardless of past promises, that the prince will need to keep in power and achieve great results. However, this "virtù" has nothing in common with moral virtue. And "fortune" for things outside onw's control. Fortune is responsible for half of what happens to us, leaving the half to ourselves, or our own virtue or merit. Fortune provides the opportunity for our own merit or virtue to be acted upon.
The ''The Prince'' advocated desperate measures for a desperate situation; Machiavelli's ridiculed half-measures and his dramatic statements and antithesis combined to produce bold and startling generalizations. Politics, he argued, is an art that is independent of morality and religion in its necessary methods. He has often been charged with cynicism for trying to discover permanently valid rules for political behavior based on observation of how men do in fact behave rather than on moral evaluation of how they ought to behave. That is, he advocated "realism" rather than "idealism" as a research technique in political science.