Echoes through time: a reputation for generosity

If your generosity is good and sincere it may pass unnoticed and it will not save you from being reproached for its opposite. If you want to sustain a reputation for generosity, therefore, you have to be ostentatiously lavish; and a prince acting in that fashion will soon squander all his resources…

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527), The Prince, chapter 16