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Who really said it

Never was anything great achieved without danger

Attributed to Niccolò Machiavelli 1469–1527 · Florentine statesman & political philosopher
Attributed Rights unconfirmed

Credited to Machiavelli on virtually every quotation site, and the sentiment squares with his writing on the peril of bold action — yet the sentence appears in none of his works (The Prince, the Discourses on Livy, the Art of War or the Life of Castruccio Castracani) and no source ever names one. It is best read as a modern distillation of his ideas rather than a line he actually wrote.

Last verified 7 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“Never was anything great achieved without danger” attributed to Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), but the line appears in none of his known works and is never sourced; likely a modern distillation of his ideas.

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We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

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Provenance

The source

Popularly credited to
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527)
Named source
None — no work or chapter is ever cited
Closest genuine text
Discourses on Livy, Bk I, ch. 2
Status
Widely attributed, but unsourced

Never was anything great achieved without danger.

No manuscript or printed work of Machiavelli’s is known to contain this sentence. The nearest authentic parallel is in the Discourses on Livy (Bk I, ch. 2), where he warns that a state “can never be reformed without great risk,” because the necessity for change “cannot arise without danger” (Gutenberg full text ↗).

Machiavelli quotations, sourced and misattributed (Wikiquote)

The paper trail

  • Every major quote site — Goodreads ↗, BrainyQuote, AZQuotes — credits Machiavelli but names no book or chapter, and Goodreads itself flags that its quotes are “not verified.”
  • The sentence is absent from The Prince ↗ and does not appear in Machiavelli’s sourced Wikiquote entry ↗.
  • Its nearest authentic root is the Discourses on Livy ↗ (Bk I, ch. 2): a state “can never be reformed without great risk.”

Machiavelli’s own writings have been in the public domain for centuries. This particular English sentence, however, cannot be traced to any of them; treat it as an anonymous modern paraphrase of his outlook rather than a quotation with a rights-holder.

Fact-check

How it’s mis-cited

The line is presented almost everywhere as a verbatim Machiavelli quotation — frequently pinned to The Prince — but it is really a case of confident mis-citation: a real Machiavellian mood attached to words he did not write.

Machiavelli’s The Prince common

The phrase occurs nowhere in The Prince. The book’s nearest thought is that there is nothing “more perilous to conduct … than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things” (ch. 6, Gutenberg ↗) — a related idea in entirely different words.

the Discourses on Livy closer, still not it

Bk I, ch. 2 says a state “can never be reformed without great risk” and that the necessity for change “cannot arise without danger” (Gutenberg ↗). That is the genuine kernel the aphorism distills — but it is not this sentence.

No known work by Machiavelli, and no edition of his quotations on Wikiquote ↗, contains ‘Never was anything great achieved without danger.’ It is best regarded as an unsourced distillation of his outlook, not something he actually wrote.

Context

Why it sticks to Machiavelli

The attribution endures because it is plausible. Machiavelli built his whole political vision around the idea that great acts — founding a state, reforming a corrupt republic, seizing and holding power — are inseparable from risk. A reader who meets “Never was anything great achieved without danger” and is told it is Machiavelli feels no friction, because it sounds exactly like him.

That plausibility is also what lets an unsourced line travel unchecked. Quote aggregators copy one another, none of them cites a chapter, and the sentence acquires the authority of repetition rather than of a page in any of his books.

It sounds like Machiavelli — which is precisely why no one checks whether he wrote it.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

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Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Machiavelli quote (unsourced)goodreads.com

The most-shared source of the attribution — credits Machiavelli, cites no work, and notes its quotes are community-added and unverified.
Machiavelli — Wikiquotewikiquote.org

Curated list of Machiavelli's sourced and misattributed quotations; this line appears in neither, underlining that no primary source has been found.
The Prince (full text)gutenberg.org

W.K. Marriott translation. Chapter 6 gives the genuine 'new order of things' passage; the aphorism itself is not present.
Discourses on Livy (full text)gutenberg.org

Book I, ch. 2 warns a state 'can never be reformed without great risk' — the authentic root idea the quote paraphrases.
A Machiavellian Mis-quoteianchadwick.com

A Machiavelli reader documenting how popular 'Machiavelli' lines turn out to be unsourced paraphrases — the same pattern at work here.

About the credited author

About Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli

1469–1527 · Florentine political philosopher and statesman

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was a Florentine diplomat, historian and political theorist whose treatise The Prince (written 1513) made his name a byword for hard-edged statecraft. His major works — The Prince, the Discourses on Livy, the Art of War and the Florentine Histories — return repeatedly to the theme that founding or reforming a state is dangerous, risky work. That reputation makes him a magnet for punchy “risk and greatness” aphorisms, many of which he never actually wrote.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Widely attributed to Niccolò Machiavelli in modern quotation collections (e.g., Goodreads, BrainyQuote, AZQuotes); no primary source in his works has been identified. Nearest authentic parallel: Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Bk I, ch. 2.

MLA (9th ed.)

Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius. Book 1, ch. 2.

APA (7th ed.)

Machiavelli, N. (n.d.). Discourses on the first decade of Titus Livius (Book 1, Chap. 2).

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Never was anything great achieved without danger’?” Last verified 7 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/never-was-anything-great-achieved-without-danger

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