Hans Morgenthau

Sourced

• International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power.
  • Politics Among Nations (1948), p. 13

• When we speak of power, we mean man's control over the minds and actions of other men.
  • Politics Among Nations (1948), p. 13

• Political power is a psychological relation between those who exercise it and those over which it is exercised. It gives the former control over certain actions of the latter through the influence which the former exert over the latter's minds. That influence may be exerted through orders, threats, persuasion, or a combination of any of those.
  • Politics Among Nations (1948), p. 14

Unsourced

• All nations are tempted... to cloth their own aspirations and action in the moral purposes of the universe.
  • This should perhaps read "to clothe"

• Influence can persuade, but power can compel.

• Throughout the nation's history, the national destiny of the United States has been understood in antimilitaristic, libertarian terms.