It is difficult to think of any politician who has lived to be eighty and still been regarded as a success. What we call a “great” statesman normally means one who dies before his policy has had time to take effect. If Cromwell had lived a few years longer he would probably have fallen from power, in which case we should now regard him as a failure. If Pétain had died in 1930, France would have venerated him as a hero and patriot. Napoleon remarked once that if only a cannon-ball had happened to hit him when he was riding into Moscow, he would have gone down to history as the greatest man who ever lived.

George Orwell (1903-1950) English journalist, essayist, writer [pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair]

Essay (1946-05), “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” Polemic Magazine
    (Source)

Published separately as a pamphlet, James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution (1946).