O excellent demonstration of the roots of casual pedantry --
Looking for Ben F's cute quip on That old vice, I came across this familiar 'old' and now New Again Prescience of Our Times:
http://www.freerepub...hat/2181646/posts
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the worldÂs great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence:
from bondage to spiritual faith
from spiritual faith 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 dependency
from dependency back to bondage.
ÂAlexander Tyler
(Except.. except that Nothing is fershure, like even 'Tyler', it seems)
http://www.lorencollins.net/tytler.html
[. . .]
Today, a Google search for "from bondage to spiritual faith" produces over 12,000 results. Well over half of those appear in conjunction with the "Why Democracies Fail" quote.
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Who, then, is the author of these quotes? Even after all of my research, I am afraid I still cannot say for certain. But perhaps some conclusions may be drawn.
Each quote can be traced back at least as far as the mid-20th century, but the quotes cannot be found to have appeared together until the 1970s. Attributions of WDF to Tytler can be found as early as 1951, the quote has been the subject of authorship inquiries in The New York Times and American Notes & Queries, both of which are notoriously good at verifying authorship of works, but neither of which could provide an author for these quotes.
Some readers may wonder why I chose to quote variations so frequently, and to go into such detail when a shorter examination would do. I had three reasons for this. First, I did a lot of research, and I didn't want to cut too much of my work. Second, I wanted to put any doubts about my thoroughness to rest. And third, through my quoting and detailing, I hoped to illustrate exactly how quotes can evolve with time. New words are added, old ones disappear, and attributions and contexts change. That's not typical of a quote that has a definitive and reliable source; it's much more common with proverbs.
These facts lead me to suspect that these quotes were probably coined by separate individuals in the first half of the twentieth century, and I'm comfortable in concluding that Henning W. Prentis, Jr. is the author of the Fatal Sequence, unless further earlier evidence comes forward. In the original version of this article, when the evidence was inconclusive as to the author of either quote, I wrote that the authors of each half were most likely not famous persons or respected scholars, but rather just private political thinkers who got their words in print, and whose words then happened to strike a chord in others. The identification of Mr. Prentis as the author of FS bolsters this interpretation; the Fatal Sequence was not coined by a political figure or noted historian, but rather the president of a cork company. The passage of time merely encouraged quoters to attach an author's name that strengthened the authority behind the words.
And that is where the vice of misattribution lies. Perhaps the words speak the truth of democratic governments; or perhaps they do not. But either way, attributing the words to a scholar who never spoke them is to lend to them an authority and reliability that they do not deserve. Quotations should not be given fictitious attributions merely to lend credence to the messages they impart. To do so is to favor persuasiveness over accuracy, and to sacrifice truth for the sake of image.
[. . .]
(Also: Nothing is ever Simple ... either!)