The budget should be balanced; the treasury should be refilled; public debt should be reduced; the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled; and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.Our concepts of a "balanced budget" and "public debt" don't really jibe with how Roman government worked, and my friend, who is not a classicist, was suspicious of the authenticity of the quotation. Certainly Cicero discussed fiscal responsibility in his speeches, and at first I thought the quotation could possibly be a badly adapted passage. But I could find no passage in any of Cicero's speeches that was remotely close to this quotation. Then I came upon a reference to this quotation in the book Respectfully Quoted, a collection of sayings used in Congressional speeches and published by the Library of Congress in 1989.
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