Machiavelli on power
Describe your situation, or just name what is on your mind. You will get the exact passage from The Prince you're looking for.
Niccolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513, out of office after the Medici took back Florence, and it reads like a manual written by a man who had watched power slip through other people's hands. The hard part, for him, was never seizing power. It was holding it. The lines below are about that: the work of staying in control once you are there. Describe your situation above and the finder returns the passage that fits.
Holding what you take
Machiavelli is most original on the danger that comes after the win. A new ruler, he argues, is in far more peril than an established one, because he has made enemies of everyone he displaced and cannot fully satisfy those who helped him rise. Nothing is harder, he writes, than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things. The warning travels: the moment of acquiring something is rarely the dangerous one. Keeping it is.
Foundations before flourish
Those who become powerful by luck rather than effort, he notes, rise easily and fall just as easily, because they never built the foundations underneath. Ability laid in afterward can hold a thing up, but only with great trouble to the builder and danger to the building. Read it as a caution against shortcuts: the structure you put up fast is the one that comes down on you later.
Knowing how to do wrong
The coldest thread in The Prince is its realism about morality. A ruler who wants to keep his position, Machiavelli says, must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge or not according to necessity. He is not celebrating cruelty; he is refusing to pretend the world rewards people only for their virtues. How one lives, he writes, is so far from how one ought to live that the person who chases the ideal at the expense of the real tends to bring about his own ruin.
Notable lines on power
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
He who has not first laid his foundations may be able with great ability to lay them afterwards, but they will be laid with trouble to the architect and danger to the building.
Injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; whilst benefits should be conferred gradually, so that they may be better enjoyed.
It is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.
How one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation.
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