Politics & Power Quote by John Keegan

Keegan’s line lands like a cold corrective to the romance of “great men” history. He’s not denying that individuals can bend events; he’s warning that the personality type drawn to national-scale transformation often comes preloaded with moral damage. The word “usually” does important work: this isn’t a cheap cynicism about leadership, it’s a probabilistic judgment from a historian who spent his life tracing how ambition collides with institutions, armies, and ordinary bodies.

The phrasing “men of power” carries a double indictment. Power here isn’t influence earned slowly inside a system; it’s the capacity to coerce, to move populations and borders, to reorder life at speeds that outpace consent. If you “seek to change the nations” you belong to, you’re already operating at a dangerous pitch of self-authorization. Keegan’s subtext is that political messianism and moral restraint rarely share a room. To will national change is to accept, often eagerly, the collateral: broken norms, silenced opponents, expendable strangers.

Context matters. Keegan wrote in the long shadow of the 20th century, where “nation-changing” leaders became a familiar genre: the charismatic modernizer, the wartime savior, the revolutionary redeemer. His work on warfare and command emphasizes the human cost hidden behind strategic language. So the quote functions as a historian’s prophylactic against hero worship: an invitation to judge leaders less by the scale of their projects than by the methods they normalize - and the kinds of people those methods reward.