Interesting Political Quotes

[American Patriot]

Marcus Tullius Cicero:"The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall."

[American Patriot]

Marcus Tullius Cicero:

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.

[Malsua]

You might want to check on that quote. I believe it's not accurate.

[American Patriot]

Marcus Tullius Cicero:

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

[American Patriot]

Author Details: Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)

Full Name Cicero, Marcus Tullius
Biography Roman author, orator, & politician

[American Patriot]

Prove it.

Let me be more precise here... what makes you think it IS NOT accurate?

[American Patriot]

There fixed it

[Malsua]

There fixed it

Yeah, the part about public assistance was tacked on there but you've edited that out now.

There was something about that quote being from a fictional book done in the 70s. I had this discussion about quotes on FR a year or so ago. Let me see if I can find it.

[Malsua]

Ok, what I find on it now is that it's completely fabricated from fictional book A Pillar of Iron (1965), page 483.

I don't have that book to verify that this is indeed the case.

[American Patriot]

I wasn't being a smart ass when I asked for proof.

I was asking because this quote was used this morning on the Bill Bennett Morning in America show this morning. So I started looking it up - and FOUND it on SEVERAL quotation sites that are allegedly checked.

As it turns out, one of the sites we were discussing the other day contained information that this was an email that went around some months back and nothing was mentioned about it being a made up quotation.

I find it amazing that several so-called "quotation sites" have this listed as accurate.

I don't have any material to show the original writing of Cicero but can look it up later.

So, my request is rather than just saying "This is inaccurate" provide some kind of data to help show it. I don't like to post things that are inaccurate to begin with (and MOST of the time, when I suspect it might be not quite right I'll say something).

But, the very FACT this quote was read out on the air this morning by a caller and not challenged by Bill or his crew led me to believe there must have been some truth in the quote.

Indeed there IS... the ACTUAL quote is now posted above (I found the original quote, I didn't "edit out" the bad part, I removed the entire quote and posted the original, accurate quote).

[Malsua]

That quotes.liberty-tree.ca site is chocked full of fake quotes, I hope that isn't one of your sources, including most of the fake Thomas Jefferson ones.

Until that book, Pillar of Iron can be checked, I wouldn't put any veracity into that quote.

for what it's worth.
http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=28532

In a letter to The Chicago Tribune (20 April 1971), John H. Collins, Professor of History at Northern Illinois University, reported that the following attribution to Cicero,

Quote:

The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. The mobs should be forced to work and not depend on government for subsistence.

actually originated in A Pillar of Iron (1965), Taylor Caldwell's fictionalized account of the life of the senator. (In fact, Collins noted that it was on page 483 of the edition he had in hand.)

Collins held that the alleged quotation "is totally without documentation," and that "the great bulk of [Caldwell's] quotations are false." He further observed that "[a] historical novelist has a perfect right to put invented conversations and anecdotes into a novel, but should not represent these inventions as authentic history."

-- Bonnie

[American Patriot]

Never heard of that one