Robert Greene insists Niccolò Machiavelli is not "cynical" — the wrong word for it — but "pretty sharp and realistic." The distinction matters: cynicism assumes the worst about people and curdles into contempt or resignation; Machiavellian realism just describes the human animal as it is — driven by a desire for power — without moral recoil. Machiavelli applied this lens even to popes, writing about Christian religious figures as though they were Mafia dons pursuing power, not out of hostility to the Church but because he refused to look away from what their actions showed.
This is the same clear-eyed lens behind Every Action Is a Sign: seeing people accurately isn't the same as assuming the worst of them. Greene traces his own receptivity to it back to a childhood sense that people "wore masks" and pretended to be something they weren't — which primed him to find Machiavelli's directness clarifying rather than cynical.
Source: Robert Greene, "What Machiavelli Has Taught Me."