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 1914—as of any era—was 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.
It's not enough to say that the Olympics is an athletic contest outside of politics, because it's not. The Chinese clearly are using the Olympics to recreate how they are viewed in the world and how they view themselves.
It used to be said that when the U.S. sneezed, the world caught a cold. The opposite is equally true today.
The one state/two state debate is irrelevant as Israel and the US consolidate Greater Israel.
Karl Rove thinks we shouldn’t have Hillary Clinton in the White House because she fell and hit her head a couple years ago, spent three days in the hospital, and maybe she has brain damage. You know, I don’t recall the Republicans being this concerned with mental fitness during the years when Reagan was talking to house plants in the White House.
I think our democracy has it exactly right: two terms, eight years. It's enough. Because it's important to have one foot in reality when you have access to this kind of power.
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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