“A conservative blog posts 2 minutes, 38 seconds of video clips of a black federal agriculture official saying she didn’t do everything she could to help a white farmer. The blogger labels it racism. Calls grow for the Obama administration to remove her. No one at the Agriculture Department or the White House checks further. The official is forced to resign. Monday ends, but not the story…”

“Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust…

“…Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government…

“…The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity….

“…Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don’t have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower…

“This is all about a class of Americans distinguishing itself from its inferiors. It recalls the Pharisee in the Temple: ‘Lord, I thank thee that I am not like other men…’

“In sum, our ruling class does not like the rest of America. Most of all does it dislike that so many Americans think America is substantially different from the rest of the world and like it that way…”

“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.

“Hypocrisy does not mean saying one thing and doing the opposite. It means saying something that one does not believe. Let’s take the example of getting drunk. Let’s say that I believe that getting drunk is immoral. Does it make me a hypocrite if I get drunk? No, it makes me weak. I could believe that it is immoral but still not be able to resist the temptation to get drunk. It doesn’t make my belief any less true or my actions any worse.

Now let’s say that Larry Flynt doesn’t believe that getting drunk is immoral. What are his consequences of getting drunk? Your comment on his living up to his own low moral standards hits the nail on the head. Objectively, my getting drunk is no more or less immoral than Larry Flynt’s.

If Larry Flynt attacked me for getting drunk, that would be hypocrisy, because he doesn’t believe that getting drunk is immoral. It’s hypocrisy for him to say that it’s OK for him to get drunk but not OK for me to get drunk.

We saw the mainstream media’s reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s addiction to pain killers and Bill Bennett’s gambling problem. These men were not hypocrites. I guarantee you that neither of these men wished for their own problems, and, after having gone through what they did, they most likely feel even more strongly about them than they did before. Again, weakness, not hypocrisy.”

“By this reasoning, Larry Flynt–an antimoralist who exposes the moral weaknesses of moralists–is the ultimate hypocrite. And in a strange way, it is a case of vice paying tribute to virtue.”