Abe Lincoln: You can fool some of the people some of the time

[deirdre]

Popular Meme:




http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/abrahamlin110340.html





'Debunk' Credit to Quote Investigator

Although it seems very possible to me that Lincoln DID actually say this in one of his speeches, the original quote seems to come from a 1684 work of apologetics titled: "Traité de la Vérité de la Religion Chrétienne" by Jacques Abbadie

One can fool some men, or fool all men in some places and times, but one cannot fool all men in all places and ages. http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/12/11/cannot-fool/

Google translate literally reads

colors of eloquence produced particular mistakes, but not the general errors;
some men have been deceived , or deceiving them all in certain places at certain time , but not all men, in all the places in all the centuries

For context:
The book has to do with Religion (obviously) and the chapter where this quote is found is labeled as:

or it shows by searching the principles of our mistakes , the feeling that establishes the existence of God , is not a false prejudice

so pretty understandable, to me anyway, that speech attendees would think it was just something Lincoln said originally if you were at that particular speech. Although we have conflicting stories about when Lincoln allegedly first said it. see QuoteInvestigator article for full details.

Richard Price Morgan (1909, p. 102) puts it in Bloomington in 1856:


"It was in the summer of the year that I received this letter
— 1856 — that I stood next to Lincoln and heard him say: "You can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time." He was addressing an assemblage of about three or four hundred people from the raised platform of the entrance to the Pike House, in Bloomington, Ill., upon the subject of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and reviewing the arguments of Douglas in support of it. His application of his epigram was so apt and so forcible that I have never forgotten it, and I believe that no verbal
modification of it would be accurate."
https://books.google.com/books?id=atBEAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA102#v=onepage&q&f=false

And i'm not sure if Lincoln could read French. will have to investigate if the book was translated by Lincoln's time. But either way the sentiment was written long before Lincoln.