spurious Lincoln quotes

Garson O'Toole adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM
Sat Feb 20 16:01:36 UTC 2010


David Parker, Professor of History at Kennesaw State University, found
and reported in 2009 an earlier citation for the quote attributed to
Abraham Lincoln concerning fooling people:

In the language of Abe Lincoln: "You can fool all the people a part of
the time, or a part of the people all the time; but you can never fool
all the people all the time."
October 29, 1886 in the Milwaukee Daily Journal

http://anotherhistoryblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/fooling-people-earlier.html

This existence of this earlier cite is recorded in WikiQuote.
Additional background information about the quote is provided in two
issues of the newsletter of the Abraham Lincoln Association:

http://abrahamlincolnassociation.org/Newsletters/5-4.pdf
http://abrahamlincolnassociation.org/Newsletters/7-3.pdf

Vic Steinbok mentions in this thread a hit in Google Books that is
dated 1884, but he is rightly suspicious of the datum. An examination
of the digital pages of the text reveals that two books have been
pasted together within the Google Books database, a too frequent error
mechanism. I believe that the citation appears within the second book,
"The Business of Living" by Dr. Frank Crane, which is dated 1920.

http://books.google.com/books?id=XjgOAAAAYAAJ&q=%22fool+all%22#v=snippet&q=%22fool%20all%22&f=false
http://books.google.com/books?id=XjgOAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Frank+Crane%22#v=snippet&q=%22Frank%20Crane%22&f=false

Garson

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