Lincoln explained why Democracy works best*.

[Kid Berwyn]

You can fool all of the people some of the time.
You can fool some of the people all of the time;
but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

* Attributed. Thanks to a large body of citizens, truth and public education.

[brush]

1. That's one of the best quotes ever. I know it's been attributted to...

to Honest Abe. Did he really say it?

[Kid Berwyn]

2. Sounds like something Abraham Lincoln would say.

The experts at History News Network say it wasn't attributed contemporaneously:

On September 2, 1858, speaking in Clinton, Illinois, during the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, Abraham Lincoln made one of his most famous statements: “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.” Or maybe he said it a couple years earlier, at the 1856 Republican Convention.

Actually, we don’t know when he said it, or even if he said it at all. The above attributions were offered nearly a half century after the fact, and are generally considered unreliable. (Thomas Schwartz, former historian of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, called the claims “tenuous,” and Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher, authors of Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, gave the claims a grade of “D.”)

Until recently, we had no documentary evidence linking Lincoln to the quotation (and no evidence of the quotation itself) before 1901, when it was included in Abe Lincoln’s Yarns and Stories, a volume compiled by Alexander McClure that claimed to be “a complete collection of the funny and witty anecdotes that made Lincoln famous.” The only source given for the quotation was an unnamed “caller at the White House.” (The claims made for 1856 and 1858 did not appear until several years after McClure’s book was published.)

In 2005, I searched several digital databases and found a number of references to Lincoln’s “fool all the people” quotation before 1901. The earliest was August 26, 1887, when the New York Times reported a speech by Fred Wheeler at a Prohibition party convention. In the speech, Wheeler discussed the debate over a particular temperance bill: “As I sat in the gallery noting the care and eagerness and anxiety of the leaders to secure its passage I could not help but think of that trite remark of Abraham Lincoln: ‘You can fool all of the people, some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.’ ”

CONTINUES...

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/161924

[brush]

3. Thanks for that. You must be a historian...or history buff?

[Kid Berwyn]

4. You are most welcome! Minor...journalism major.

Thank you, my Friend. I, too, appreciate your appreciation for the quote. It is profound.

Fascist tyrants and creepy oligarchs and autocrats exploit this 1984 brave new world order of a planet. Unopposed, they’d long ago have established dominance. Our nation, and by extension the democratic allegiance we lead, have opposed them since December 7, 1941. Our vision for the future is shaped by sharing ideas. We all have a voice and, thus, a piece of the action. When it comes to political freedom, it is protected and shared by the Democracies, We the People.