“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.”
- and -
“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.”
The article linked above does a credible job of tracing these two quotes back as far as possible back into the mists of time, which become impassably opaque in this case circa 1950.
As for the ideas behind the two quotes, there is much about them that ring true. Indeed, I linked to a quote very similar to the first one late last year, except that the one that I found has a clearly documented source (I think). The time scale might be a bit too much to swallow though. (Collins points out that the time scale of 200 years was added to the quote later, which makes sense considering the contexts in which it was later used.)
The second one also has the ring of truth. The quote aptly describes the boom and bust of any civilzation, and the concurrent sources of those peaks and valleys. I would tend to suspect that this saying was crafted by whoever said it first using the example of the Hebrews of the Old Testament. Of course the curiosity of that example is that it began thousands of years ago and has persisted to the present day in one form or another, against global odds, and usually despite itself.
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