"Remember November," a Republican website criticizing President Obama, features this quotation from Abraham Lincoln: "It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you may even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all the people all the time."
There is no evidence that Lincoln ever said any such thing. From Respectfully Quoted:
There is no evidence that Lincoln ever said any such thing. From Respectfully Quoted:
Many quotation books have also attributed this to Lincoln, and the sources given have varied. According to Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 3, p. 81 (1953), “Tradition has come to attribute to the Clinton [Illinois] speeches [September 2, 1858] one of Lincoln’s most famous utterances—‘You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.’” But he goes on to say that the epigram and any references to it have not been located in surviving Lincoln documents.
