Post #321,135
2/8/10 9:53:17 AM
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could be worse you could live in King NC
buncha retards
http://www.wxii12.co...87153/detail.html
King SOE gives me a better understanding of "arrogance of officialdom" in this quote: What Have We Learned In 2064 Years? "The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." Cicero--55 BC some things never change
If we torture the data long enough, it will confess. (Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, 1991)
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Post #321,137
2/8/10 10:13:47 AM
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King is just up the road from Mayberry, RFD.
http://en.wikipedia....#Real-life_models
Many little towns around there are stuck in 1950s TV Land.
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #321,138
2/8/10 10:16:55 AM
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another thing that never changes
...is the willingness of people like box to circulate bogus quotations like this one attributed to Cicero, which appears nowhere in the oratorical opportunist's works and which first appeared in print in an editorial in the Kansas City Star on 15 January 1896. See They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions by Paul F. Boller Jr. and John George, Oxford University Press, 1989.
cordially,
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Post #321,139
2/8/10 10:30:31 AM
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close enuff for govt work
The Truth:
This alleged quote from Marcus Tullius Cicero that began circulating on the Internet in October, 2008, is based on a true statement from the great Roman orator, but someone added a lot to it to make it match some of what the United States was facing economically.
The actual quote is: "The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall."
If we torture the data long enough, it will confess. (Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, 1991)
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Post #321,149
2/8/10 11:07:03 AM
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Assistance to foreign hands != public assistance
That addition makes makes the false version appear to be primarily about personal responsibility. The real quote was about the danger of over-reaching.
Which I've been thinking about lately. Someone quoted the line about Switzerland recently: "Five hundred years of peace and democracy and what have they produced? The cuckoo clock?" My first thought was, "Well, that and five hundred years of peace and democracy."
There's something to be said for an overdeveloped sense of "None of my business." Yes, the Nazis were evil, and keeping those deposits for all these decades seems wrong. But haven't (some) people been saying for a while now that you can't force people to embrace freedom/democracy/just-plain-goodness, they have to take it for themselves? Perhaps that's what Cicero was talking about, in not offering help to foreign hands.
--
Drew
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Post #321,152
2/8/10 11:32:11 AM
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actually the above was a 1/2 assed apology to rand not
serious. Cut n Paste on the net is easy and lazy
If we torture the data long enough, it will confess. (Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, 1991)
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Post #321,153
2/8/10 11:47:54 AM
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Make it a full-assed apology and we'll talk
Your "actual quote" comes word-for-word from that same Kansas City Star editorial. It probably made its way into living memory and thence onto the internets via hack novelist Taylor Caldwell's 1965 novel A Pillar of Iron, which is apparently littered with similar bogosities. For the Caldwell connection I am indebted to a 1971 letter to the Chicago Tribune by John H. Collins, Professor of History at Northern Illinois University, who added that a novelist "has a perfect right to put invented conversations and anecdotes into a novel, but should not represent these inventions as authentic history."
Spurious quotations attributed to eminent characters of the past are by way of a minor hobby of mine, box. If I tell you one of these is of dodgy provenance you can take that assertion—but not the counterfeit nugget—to the bank.
cordially,
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Post #321,155
2/8/10 11:52:38 AM
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full-assed it is
always glad to get called on something, learn something new every day
If we torture the data long enough, it will confess. (Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, 1991)
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