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.
Want to depose the government of a poor country with resources? Want to bash Muslims? Want to build support for American military interventions around the world? Want to undermine governments that are raising their people up from poverty because they don't conform to the tastes of Upper West Side intellectuals? Use human rights as your excuse!
Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible.
I defend Israel's right to exist, to defend themselves, to not let themselves be exterminated a second time.
Brexit is the other face of the refugee crisis - tensions that lead to stasis, external risks that lead to asymmetric shocks.
Mr. President, you’re entitled as a president to your own airplane, and to your own house, but not to your own facts.
When people hear the term 'political prisoner,' especially on the Left, it becomes a kind of abstraction. Folks are aware of injustice, and they're aware that there are folks in prison who are in prison, you know, largely because of their activism.
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