At a nice blog called The Statrix, I found a cool quote which is attributed to Benjamin Franklin:

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!

While this is a great quote, it seems hard to believe that it’s authentic, mainly because of the language used. I did a little checking and came across a page on Google’s Answers where a few people weigh in on the possible origin of it. According to one, the word lunch wasn’t in popular use til decades after his death. Another suggests that the part about the lamb being armed was added later, but is otherwise authentic. The one I suspect is more accurate though is that it comes from an old saying that says something to the effect of:

“Democracy consists of two brigands and a traveller voting for whose purse should be looted”

In any event, I tend to agree. This just upholds my theory about how if you want to convince people of ideas, one of the funnest ways to do it is concoct an artificial quote and attribute it to somebody who is well-respected, like so:

And then Jesus said, “I like big butts. I cannot lie.” (Luke 11:16)

And then if you’re lucky, this will get picked up by other people who don’t know and repeated ad infinitum until it’s pretty much impossible to tell where it came from originally.