(3089/898) From complacency to apathy

807) The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind. [...] In this field every person must be his own watchman for the truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the truth from the false for us.

Thomas v Collins, 323 U.S. 516 (1945)
posted by D. Citron [UAQ] (4/27/95)

808) A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse (that is, excessive gratuities) 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 results 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. These nations have progressed through this sequence:

1. From bondage to spiritual faith.


2. From spiritual faith to great courage.


3. From courage to liberty.


4. From liberty to abundance.


5. From abundance to selfishness.


6. From selfishness to complacency.


7. From complacency to apathy.


8. From apathy to dependency.


9. From dependency back again into bondage.

Professor Alexander Tyler
The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic
posted by Gary Klau [UAQ] (4/27/95)

[Note: Also,

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

John Adams
letter (4/15/1814)
published in
The Works of John Adams (1851)]

809) When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by their act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.

John Kenneth Galbraith
The Age of Uncertainty (1977) [CQ]

[Note: Of course, this response by the people is dependent on their collective belief that their votes will be counted with a reasonable degree of accuracy, a belief which has been considerably eroded by the U.S. Supreme Court-aborted recount in the 2000 Presidential election, and by the advent of paperless electronic voting machines which have an extraordinary lack of accountability.]

Sources

[CQ] - Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)
[UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup


Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 666 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.