Why Democracies Fail

    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.

The above quote is often unverifiably attributed to Alexander
Tytler. The second paragraph, "Fatal Sequence", may have been written
originally by Henning Webb Prentis, Jr. (Loren Collins. "The Truth
About Tytler." January 25, 2009. Accessed July 30, 2009
<http://www.lorencollins.net/tytler.html>.)