- [first lines]
- Cesare Borgia: [arriving in Milan] Ah, Jean.
- Jean de Foix: [embracing him] I bring you boundless love from my sister, Charlotte.
- Cesare Borgia: She's well? And my daughter?
- Jean de Foix: Both are. Elsie. They miss you.
- Cesare Borgia: And King Louis, does he miss me? Will I be embraced? Or arrested?
- Jean de Foix: Hard to say. When Louis arrived here in Milan, he was singing your praises. Cesare,
- [French accolades]
- Jean de Foix: . Cesare
- [French accolades]
- Jean de Foix: . Cesare
- [French accolades]
- Jean de Foix: , subjugating the Papal States.
- Cesare Borgia: Uniting?
- Jean de Foix: Uniting. Then word came that you had seized Arezzo, and marched too close the Florence.
- Cesare Borgia: Then I must find out what the sight of Cesare Borgia does...
- Guidebaldo de Montefeltro: My sword will debone this bastard son of a corrupt priest!
- Cesare Borgia: Ah Guidebaldo, how nice to see you fully dressed. I'm told that as my troops approached Alvino you fled your castle wearing nothing but your fear!
- Agapito Geraldini: Perhaps you should travel to Rome and relay the, um, status of your campaign to the Pope in person.
- Cesare Borgia: The status? I was DEFEATED!
- Agapito Geraldini: In war one does count individual battles. History remembers only he who dictates the treaty.
- Cesare Borgia: Priests make themselves essential by standing between truth and man. So do astrologers. I want neither in my life.
- Lorenz Beheim: I am dismissed?
- Cesare Borgia: Yes.
- Lorenz Beheim: A man must believe in a greater power, or he becomes a man without the power live.
- Cesare Borgia: There is faith, and there is blind ignorance. Perhaps our lives, perhaps the entire universe, is a sharp aching tooth in the mouth of some monster.
- Alessandro Farnese: Cesare, if there is one thing that defines our relationship, one reason we have been at each other's throats, and in each other's hearts, it is because you live in the present, while I live in the past and the future. You're depressed now because you have reason to be depressed now. Tomorrow you may still be depressed, but you will just as likely experience something much grander. If I was depressed yesterday, I carry that into tomorrow. I wish I could operate as you do, living each day on its singular terms.
- Cesare Borgia: I'm not depressed. I am not anything I claim to be. Not Caesar, not Fortuna's darling, not the Son of God. I'm nothing.
- Cesare Borgia: [waking and sitting up in a coffin] Do your eyes see me differently?
- Leonardo Da Vinci: If Cesare Borgia suffers a loss, I expect nothing less than a total loss. Mediocrity I despise.
- Cesare Borgia: And yet by being a man it's impossible to be anything other than mediocre.
- Cesare Borgia: [upon seeing a Da Vinci's famous Vitruvian Man drawing] We're all legless soldiers in need of a crutch, or helping hand. Yet I begin to believe that I am possessed by a spirit greater than Fortuna. A spirit which rivals God. Perhaps this spirit is the Devil. But no. He, she, it, is even more intense than evil. Is it possible to transcend all earthly knowledge? Or heavenly power? Or hell's darkness? Am I the most alive being who has ever existed? Or am I insane? And does a man need to *be* insane to be *all* that he is? Or can be.