There are other questionable quotes in Annoyed's article. The quotes attributed to Karl Marx, "Democracy is the road to Socialism," and Lenin, “Democracy is indispensable to socialism,” seem out of place for those two progenitors of Communist ideology. I am somewhat familiar with the writings of Marx, and although I have never read Lenin, I cannot see either of these men making those statements. A check of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and several other sources ended with the same results I had with the de Tocqueville quote, no attribution of when or where either Marx or Lenin said or wrote these quotes.
Annoyed also uses the old propagandist's trick of quoting a respected individual out of context to fortify his argument. In this case, the individual is James Madison, and the quote he uses is from The Federalist Papers, Number 10. Here is the quote as Annoyed uses it: “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
There is a problem with Annoyed's use of this quote: while it gives the impression that Madison feared any form of popular government, the reality of the paragraph is that his concern was solely with direct democracy, and the factionalizing of a people that this form of government creates. Here is the paragraph in its entirety (I have underlined both Madison's statement of the paragraph's subject, and Annoyed's out of context quote):
“From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”
For myself, I always endeavor to correctly attribute any quote or story I use in my articles. In the case of the two quotes (Jefferson's and de Tocqueville's) at the beginning of this article, I tell you exactly where you may reference the quotes.
Sometimes though, this is not possible, for example the story about Kung Fu-Tze and rectifying the language. Sometime, in the last four or five years, I read or heard this story, and it stuck with me. It might have been a show on PBS or the History Channel, or it may have been a library book that I have long since returned. Either way, the story stuck with me, but I do not remember the source of that story, nor have I been able to find the original source.
For this reason, I have described the story as apocryphal. If I cannot give you an exact reference for a quote, I will always try and tell you this fact for the sake of honesty, and in the hope that perhaps someone can enlighten me.
The point I am trying to make is this: in a world where Presidents' lie lie our nation into a war, tobacco companies deny the inherent danger of their products, and people lie out of habit, not necessity; it is important as a commentator to be certain that the quotes we are using to support our arguments are not fabricated out of whole cloth.
The United States can only go forward if we view the world as it is, not as we wish it was. Utopian visions of the left and right must give way to pragmatic fact. It is only in our unswerving dedication to the pursuit of the truth, that we can hold together our democracy and its peoples, no matter how acrimonious our nation's political dialogue might become. It is only if we subordinate this pursuit of the truth to winning arguments, that we risk falling into the abyss of despotism and the tyranny of expediency.
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