[Ads-l] Slight Antedating of Lincoln-Attributed Quotation

[Jonathan Lighter]

A few days after writing his letter, manufacturer H. Clay Bascom, Esq., of
Troy, N.Y., became the gubernatorial candidate of the Prohibitionist
Party.  Also in 1885 he received a U.S. patent for a "parlor-stove."

He died in 1896.

JL

On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 8:08 AM Shapiro, Fred <
00001ac016895344-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:

> The great quotationeer Garson O'Toole pushed back the earliest dating for
> the great Abraham-Lincoln-attributed quotation about fooling all the
> people.  Garson's dating was 9 September 1885 (in a Syracuse newspaper).  I
> used this dating in the New Yale Book of Quotations.
>
> I have now found a slightly earlier occurrence of the attribution to
> Lincoln:
>
> 1885 The Voice (New York) 3 Sept. 3 / 4 (Newspapers.com)  Was it not Mr.
> Lincoln who said: "You can fool the people some of the time, and you can
> fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the
> people all the time."
>
> NOTE:  This citation is in a letter to the editor by H. Clay Bascom..  The
> letter is dated 24 Aug. 1885.
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


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"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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