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
Not Cicero — Taylor Caldwell, in a 1965 novelTaylor Caldwell1900–1985 · British-born American novelist of historical fiction
The passage was written by Taylor Caldwell for her 1965 novel A Pillar of Iron, where it appears on page 483 as narration summarising the fictional Cicero’s own position, which a fictional Antonius is said to agree with — not words Cicero speaks aloud. Louisiana Congressman Otto E. Passman recast it as a direct Cicero quotation in a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on 4 May 1966, swapping “the arrogance of the generals” for “the arrogance of officialdom,” and it has circulated as Cicero ever since. It is in none of Cicero’s speeches, letters or treatises.
“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” Not Cicero. The passage was written by Taylor Caldwell for her 1965 novel "A Pillar of Iron" (Doubleday, p. 483), where it is narration rather than anything Cicero says aloud. Rep. Otto E. Passman recast it as a direct Cicero quotation in a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on 4 May 1966. The Congressional Research Service called it almost certainly spurious in 1989. — Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Marcus Tullius Cicero. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
Evoking the world of Taylor Caldwell — British-born American novelist of historical fiction. Theme: "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". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
Where the words actually come from
True source
A Pillar of Iron
Written by
Taylor Caldwell — as narration, not as dialogue
Published
1965 · Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y. · passage on p. 483
First passed off as Cicero
4 May 1966 · Rep. Otto E. Passman, House Appropriations subcommittee hearing
Mr. PASSMAN. The committee will come to order. You know occasionally in our busy and bored lives we run into interesting, well written books of history. The path that we are traveling is a complete duplication of great nations that preceded us in greatness and finally fell by their foolishness. I would like to quote one or two items for the record. I am quoting them verbatim. One— The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt, the mob should be forced to work and not depend on government for subsistence, and prudence and frugality should be put into practice. Cicero, 58 B.C.
Recorded 4 May 1966
This is the moment the line became a quotation: a US House subcommittee hearing, 4 May 1966, printed by the Government Printing Office. Passman says he is quoting verbatim from a book of history — he is in fact quoting a novel published the year before, and he has changed it. Caldwell’s sentence is indirect narration summarising the fictional Cicero’s own position, which Antonius is said to agree with, and it reads “the arrogance of the generals,” not of officialdom.
1965 — Taylor Caldwell publishes A Pillar of Iron (Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y.). On page 483, narration summarises the fictional Cicero’s own position — a balanced budget, a refilled Treasury, reduced public debt, curtailed assistance to foreign lands — which a fictional Gaius Antonius Hybrida heartily agrees with. Cicero never speaks the words. Wikiquote records the page, and p. 371 of the 1966 Collins edition ↗
4 May 1966 — Rep. Otto E. Passman of Louisiana reads it into a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing as a verbatim quotation from Cicero, dated 58 B.C., with “the arrogance of the generals” changed to “officialdom.” A Chicago Tribune column carries it that 16 November. Quote Investigator documents both ↗
25 April 1968 — Passman reads the passage into the Congressional Record as Cicero’s warning about share-the-wealth programs, and repeats it to Secretary of State Dean Rusk at a hearing that May. Snopes prints the Congressional Record text ↗
1971, then 1989 — Prof. John H. Collins offers $50 to the Chicago Tribune letter-writer’s favourite charity if anyone can cite chapter and verse for it anywhere in Cicero, and names page 483 as its real home; the Congressional Research Service later rules in Respectfully Quoted that no evidence confirms Cicero said the words and it is almost certainly spurious. Both are quoted at Quote Investigator ↗
The wording originates in Taylor Caldwell’s A Pillar of Iron, published by Doubleday in 1965 — far too recent to be public domain in the United States, so the underlying passage is in copyright to her estate and publisher. Nothing here is a public-domain ancient text: Cicero’s own Latin has been free for two millennia, but this sentence is not Cicero’s. The circulating rewrite — “officialdom” for “the generals,” the added “public assistance” sentence — has no identifiable author, so its status is unsettled; treat the whole passage as protected rather than free. The 1966 hearing transcript excerpted above is a US Government Printing Office document and is in the public domain.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What’s wrong with the version you saw
Almost every element of the popular version is manufactured — the speaker, the date, and several of the words themselves.
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The speakerMarcus Tullius Cicero Fabricated
The passage is in none of Cicero’s speeches, letters or treatises. Quote Investigator ↗ traces it to page 483 of Taylor Caldwell’s 1965 novel A Pillar of Iron, and Wikiquote ↗ lists it under Misattributed for the same reason.
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The date stamped on it“Cicero, 55 B.C.” and “Cicero, 58 B.C.” Invented
Both dates were attached after the fact. Rep. Otto E. Passman labelled it “58 B.C.” in his 1966 hearing testimony; the “55 B.C.” label spread later, and by 1992 a San Francisco Chronicle column was reporting a “55 B.C.” version copied off a poster in a São Paulo notary’s office — both documented at Quote Investigator ↗.
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The wording“the arrogance of officialdom” Altered
Caldwell’s sentence has the arrogance of the generals, and Snopes ↗ notes that the circulating version now refers to generic officialdom rather than military figures. The swap is already there in Passman’s 1966 hearing text, printed at Quote Investigator ↗.
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The closing sentence“People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance” Not in the novel
Caldwell wrote that the mobs should be forced to work and not depend on government for subsistence. The “public assistance” phrasing is a later rewrite; Quote Investigator ↗ records it in a 1992 newspaper version of the saying.
✓Cicero did argue something adjacent, in his own words: in the Pro Sestio he described Gaius Gracchus’s grain law as popular because it supplied food without labour, and opposed by the good men because it would draw people from industry to idleness and drain the treasury — Pro Sestio, chapter 48 at Perseus ↗. That is a real Roman argument about a real Roman law, and it is not the quotation on the poster.
Context
How a novelist’s sentence became a Roman senator’s warning
Caldwell’s novel is not a forgery — it is a novel, and it never claims Cicero said this. The sentence on page 483 is narration: a summary of the fictional Cicero’s own position, which a fictional Gaius Antonius Hybrida heartily agreed with, before the imagined conversation turns to how any of it would be paid for. What made the line so portable was the foreword, in which Caldwell described translating hundreds of Cicero’s letters herself and told readers that wherever the book says “Cicero wrote,” the letters are authentic. Readers generalised that promise to the whole book.
The passage entered public life in 1966, when Rep. Otto E. Passman of Louisiana — who spent three decades in Congress fighting foreign-aid spending — read it into a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing as a verbatim quotation, dated it “58 B.C.,” and changed “the arrogance of the generals” to “the arrogance of officialdom.” A Chicago Tribune column carried it that November, Passman repeated it to Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1968, and from there it moved through letters pages, columns and eventually cable news, shedding and gaining clauses each time. The closing sentence in today’s most common version — “People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance” — is not in the novel at all.
No evidence has been found to confirm that Cicero said these words, and it is almost certainly spurious.
The 1971 challenge nobody could answer
In March 1971 a Chicago Tribune reader quoted the passage as Cicero’s warning to a bankrupting Rome. The following month the paper printed a reply from John H. Collins, Professor of History at Northern Illinois University, who offered to contribute $50 to that reader’s favourite charity if he or anyone else could cite chapter and verse for it anywhere in Cicero’s known writings, identified page 483 of A Pillar of Iron as its actual home, and noted that a novelist may invent conversations but should not present them as authentic history. Quote Investigator credits researcher Bonnie Taylor-Blake with locating both the letter and the passage in the novel.
In 1989 the Congressional Research Service, asked about it often enough to publish a ruling, entered the quotation in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations with the verdict that no evidence had been found to confirm Cicero said the words and that the saying is almost certainly spurious. The attribution has nevertheless outlived every debunking of it: a CNN host offered a trimmed version as something Cicero “is believed to have said” in 2011.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1900–1985 · British-born American novelist of historical fiction
Janet Miriam Taylor Caldwell was born in Manchester, England in 1900 and died in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1985. She built a long career on sweeping historical and religious novels — Dear and Glorious Physician on Saint Luke, The Earth Is the Lord’s on Genghis Khan, and the best-selling Captains and the Kings — and A Pillar of Iron (1965) was her novel about Cicero. Her foreword advertised years of research and hundreds of Cicero letters translated in the Vatican Library, which is a large part of why readers took her invented lines for documented history.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Source of the wording
Taylor Caldwell, A Pillar of Iron: A Novel about Cicero and the Rome He Tried to Save (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 483. Earliest attribution to Cicero documented by Quote Investigator: U.S. House of Representatives, Foreign Assistance and Related Agencies Appropriation Bill for 1967: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, 89th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1966), 673 — remarks of Rep. Otto E. Passman, 4 May 1966.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘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’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-budget-should-be-balanced-the-treasury-should-be/