The Truth About Tytler

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 03 Sep 2007 14:05:15 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Loren Collins did extensive research of the source of the following quote, nowadays attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee. He could find no evidence of the veracity of this attribution. Rather, it appears to be from an anonymous source, sometime in the early twentieth century, with the attribution being tacked on later. Good quote, though. [google]

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

Other analyses of this quote: Wikipedia, Snopes

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