Thatcher quote misattributed to Gibbon

[Eric M.]

You have a quotation misattributed to Edward Gibbon, that begins "In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security." This wasn't written by Gibbon. It's actually a slightly changed version of a passage in a 1995 article by Margaret Thatcher entitled "The Moral Foundations of Society," which was an edited version of a lecture Thatcher had given at Hillsdale College in November 1994. Here the actual passage from Thatcher's article, which appeared in the March 1995 edition of Imprimis:

"[M]ore than they wanted freedom, the Athenians wanted security. Yet they lost everything-security, comfort, and freedom. This was because they wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them. The freedom they were seeking was freedom from responsibility. It is no wonder, then, that they ceased to be free. In the modern world, we should recall the Athenians' dire fate whenever we confront demands for increased state paternalism."

The quoted passage originated with Thatcher. In characterizing the Athenians in the article she mistakenly cited Edward Gibbon, but she was actually paraphrasing material from a chapter (entitled "Athens' Failure") of the book The Echo of Greece (1957), pp. 47-48, by classicist Edith Hamilton.

I've added the correct quotation in the Margaret Thatcher section, but the misattribution to Gibbon should be removed. It's already running rampant through the Internet.