that who said it?

Still have to learn how to make the entire image show up in DU, sorry.

Surely worth knowing the quote and who said it! Thanks

I hate waiting forever to for Twitter to load. But a right click on one of these posts saves the image so I can see it there.

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It isn’t 2000 years old.

It was made by Taylor Caldwell in “A Pillar of Iron”.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/33210-a-nation-can-survive-its-fools-and-even-the-ambitious

See the Catilinarian orations. Cicero and his compatriots dealt with a similar situation we are now faced with. Lucius Sergius Catilina's activities rhyme quite well with Donald J. Trump's. Brings up the question.... is it OK in times of crises to step outside the constraints of rule of law in order to save and preserve rule of law? That's a conundrum, with the added wrinkle of the recent SCOTUS ruling on presidential immunity.

I'm an intractable pragmatist, and side with Cicero on that question. The purists among us will vehemently argue that I'm wrong. My response is, enjoy patting yourself on the back for your pity while rotten in an authoritarian prison cell or worse. In that situation, tell me, of what use was your ideological purity?

stacks and shelve it in the Christian Fiction section, until they told me to stop doing that.

A novel is by definition fiction. To say something is fictional is to deny its existence in reality. IMO. I think it's pretty funny.

you can't trust all search engines on the net and social media
oh the horror-

Not terribly religious, but my parents were. Spent a lot of time in Church. One thing as a teen the Pastor said that stuck with me (to paraphrase)

"When the Anti-Christ comes back, he'll be good looking, a nice smile, a sparkle in his eyes, firm handshake, and say all the right things you're wanting to hear. He is after all, the Lord of Lies."

Hello, Donny. (Giving him too much credit, he's nowhere near good looking, but is a hell of a liar.)

.......He is all these things to his fans.

"When the Anti-Christ comes back, he'll be good looking, a nice smile, a sparkle in his eyes, firm handshake, and say all the right things you're wanting to hear. He is after all, the Lord of Lies."

He and his compadres dealt with some of the same bullshit we are. And history does rhyme. Thus, Franklin's famous quote..."A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

They want a strong central authority, where you may have 3 branches but two of them support the stong leader. Structurally both Russia and Venezuela are kinds of republics and a form of democracy, but since two branches are lickspittles to Putin or Maduro, they function as near-dictatorships. A written Constitution and set of laws that are specific enough to be applied fairly straighforwardly are also desiderata.

Doesn't it ever occur to them that the dictator they want to put in power isn't going to live forever? And that they might possibly not like the guy who takes his place?

To me, it seems like a ridiculously huge leap of faith to support a would be dictator. No matter how much you may like the prospective ruler that you're trying to install, there is absolutely no guarantee that he'll be succeeded by someone you'll like or that the next guy will be. And then what? You can't vote him out. Are you really up for a possible revolution, or at least a coup, every time power has to be transferred to a new head of state?

Seems like these folks are indulging in a lot of magical thinking if they can't see the dangers inherent in turning a constitutional republic into a totalitarian state.

Permanently derailed and bankrupted by a elite-backed dictatorship that took on a mountain of foreign debt - which they mainly used to allow elites to dollarize and offshore everything.

Leaving Argentina, "the richest poor country in the world."

And to "cope," they depress everyone else's living standards and condemn the economy to a near-constant depression.

When you talk to RW Argentines, they're never really "Argentine."

"Oh - I'm Italian..." or French, or Basque - but never Argentine (perish the thought!).

In a word, a bunch of Jared Kushners and J.D. Vances.

TFG wants to eliminate elections

write something in your paper that struck you as profound, then attribute it to a historical figure obscure enough not to have a topic expert on the faculty. Back in my day = uphill both ways, when we did our papers with quill pen and berry juice for ink.

The Twitter quote is dated 42 BC.