Barbara W. Tuchman - Power Quotes

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After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.

Barbara W. Tuchman
The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.

Barbara W. Tuchman
If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements, corrupts even more.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as the most flagrant of all the passions.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others—only to lose it over themselves.

Barbara W. Tuchman
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interwar period, appeasement of Fascism.

Barbara W. Tuchman
In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.

Barbara W. Tuchman