Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
Interpretation
Desire can often influence decision-making and create justifications for policies.
The quote by Barbara Tuchman suggests that when individuals or groups desire something, they can invariably frame arguments to support that desire as a legitimate policy decision. This highlights the tendency of people to bend reasoning and facts to suit their needs or wants, emphasizing the influence of subjective motives on objective policymaking.
In practice
A politician may use this quote during a debate to highlight how policies can be swayed by personal desires.
In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.
When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting. When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.
One constant among the elements of 1914βas of any eraβwas the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.
Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.
The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!
Political leaders still think things can be done through force, but that cannot solve terrorism. Backwardness is the breeding ground of terror, and that is what we have to fight.
NATO was constructed on the - with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?
Appeasement does not work. As was the case in the 1930s, we see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive dictator threatening his neighbors.
Afghanistan's borders are arbitrary, drawn to meet 19th-century political needs rather than to respect ethnic or religious patterns.
The USA is a threat to world peace. Who are they to pretend that they are the policemen of the world, the ones that should decide for the people of Iraq what should be done with their government and their leadership. All that [the USA] wants is Iraqi oil. [Blair is] simply the foreign minister of the United States. He is no longer prime minister of Britain.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.