Tracing a quote to its origins

I stumbled across an interesting website yesterday. Have you ever seen this quote?

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.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.

It’s semi-famous in some circles, and every now and then people email it around. Snippets of it get quoted hither and thither, and it’s often attributed to “an obscure Scotsman” by the name of Tytler.

The truth, as it always is, is more complicated — and more interesting.

Check out “The Truth About Tytler” for some great scholarship tracing the evolution of the quote.