[untenured]

Be very careful with this quote. I have seen it variously attributed to "Alexander Tytler," "Alexander Titus" and other similar combinations. It is often unsourced when it is used. I once tried to track it down in Bartlett's and other authoritative quote sources and was unsuccessful. If it was ever said, I'm not sure it was contemporaneously documented.

Web pages are full of mis-attributed quotes, so don't rely on them. I wouldn't trust it unless I had the document from which it came in my hands.

[Oztrich Boy]

I found this at Neal Boortz's site:
This is one of my favorites. From Alexander Tyler.

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Be very careful with this quote. I have seen it variously attributed to "Alexander Tytler," "Alexander Titus" and other similar combinations. ... If it was ever said, I'm not sure it was contemporaneously documented.

Hey this is the Internet. People misspell all the time. It is a hugh and series problem.

But:
"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. These nations have progressed through this sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage."
-- Alexander Fraser Tytler (later Lord Alexander Fraser Woodhouslee), in The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic, published 1776.