Daily Inspiration Quote by John Keegan

Keegan’s line is a deliberately provocative inversion of a modern reflex: that power automatically corrupts, and that the decent should keep their hands clean. Coming from a historian of war and leadership, it’s less a compliment than a challenge to our cynicism. “Good men” aren’t fascinating because goodness is rare; they’re fascinating because power is a solvent. Put someone in command and you learn what their morality is made of: principle or performance, discipline or self-regard.

The verb choice matters. “Exercise power” suggests something practiced and controlled, like a muscle or a craft, not merely possessing authority or benefiting from it. Keegan is pointing at the active moment where ethics meets decision: orders given, resources allocated, lives risked. Goodness in private is cheap; goodness under pressure is a high-stakes behavior, visible in compromises refused, in violence limited, in responsibility accepted rather than outsourced.

The subtext is also quietly anti-romantic. He’s not praising innocence. He’s interested in the rare figure who can withstand the seductions that come with being listened to, obeyed, flattered, and feared. That rarity is why it’s “fascinating”: it runs against the grain of history’s default setting, where institutions reward ruthlessness and justify harm with necessity.

Contextually, Keegan wrote amid late-20th-century disillusionment about leaders and wars. His career was spent anatomizing commanders as human beings rather than mythic geniuses. This sentence reads like a field note from that project: the true drama isn’t power itself, but the moral skill required to wield it without becoming its creature.