
“If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.”
Interview with Michael Moore in the movie Sicko (2007).
2000s
The quote "When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the…" is famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat.
There is no evidence that Franklin ever actually said or wrote this, but it's remarkably similar a quote often attributed, without proper sourcing, to Alexis de Tocqueville and Alexander Fraser Tytler:
:A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.
Misattributed
“If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.”
Interview with Michael Moore in the movie Sicko (2007).
2000s
“Popular suffrage is in itself no guarantee of freedom. People can vote themselves into slavery.”
Source: The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1954), p. 61
C'est vrai, c'est vrai qu'on a été battus, au fond, par quoi? Par l'argent pis des votes ethniques, essentiellement.
1995 referendum concession speech.
"The Future of Democracy" http://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/what-i-saw-in-america/19/
What I Saw in America (1922)
Context: The last hundred years has seen a general decline in the democratic idea. If there be anybody left to whom this historical truth appears a paradox, it is only because during that period nobody has been taught history, least of all the history of ideas. If a sort of intellectual inquisition had been established, for the definition and differentiation of heresies, it would have been found that the original republican orthodoxy had suffered more and more from secessions, schisms, and backslidings. The highest point of democratic idealism and conviction was towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the American Republic was 'dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal.' It was then that the largest number of men had the most serious sort of conviction that the political problem could be solved by the vote of peoples instead of the arbitrary power of princes and privileged orders.
Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)
This is a variant expression of a sentiment which is often attributed to Tocqueville or Alexander Fraser Tytler, but the earliest known occurrence is as an unsourced attribution to Tytler in "This is the Hard Core of Freedom" by Elmer T. Peterson in The Daily Oklahoman (9 December 1951): "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."
Misattributed
Variant: The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.
“When people freely identify with their work and find themselves through it, excellence follows.”
Source: Doing Virtuous Business (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 52.
Gaius Marcius (Coriolanus) 14.2, translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert, Makers of Rome: Nine Lives by Plutarch (Harmondsworth : Penguin Books 1965) ISBN 0140441581, p. 27
Parallel Lives