At 4:02 PM +0100 2001-06-26, Alan Cox wrote:
> > > There is a saying in he UK 'You can fool all of the people some of the
>> > time, you can fool some of the people all the time, but you
>>cannot fool all
>> > of the people all of the time'.
>>
>> Didn't Abraham Lincoln say that? :)
>
>[Digs]
>Indeed in 1864.
Perhaps, perhaps not.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/970217/17linc.htm
>What Zall did with the plethora of Lincoln anecdotes--include and
>evaluate the apparently authentic, delete the seemingly
>apocryphal--other historians are doing with collections of his
>words. Their task is daunting: No American is more quoted--or
>misquoted--than Lincoln. Their work also is important: The image of
>Lincoln, the historical as well as the mythical, has been shaped to
>an uncommon degree by statements that other people put in his mouth,
>often to suit their own purposes.
>
>Stanford's Don Fehrenbacher and his wife, Virginia, spent 12 years
>compiling the Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford
>University Press, 1996, $60), a collection of 1,900 quotations
>attributed to Lincoln by more than 500 of his contemporaries. The
>scholars rated the authenticity of quotations with letter grades: A
>for a direct quote the listener wrote down soon after hearing it; B
>for a quickly recorded indirect quote; C for quotes reported weeks,
>months, or years later; D for one "about whose authenticity there is
>more than average doubt"; E for those "probably not authentic."
>
>No fooling. One now familiar line the Fehrenbachers examined was far
>from familiar to 19th-century America: "You can fool all the people
>some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you
>can't fool all the people all of the time." The saying apparently
>first emerged in print in 1901 in Lincoln's Yarns and Stories; the
>book identified the person who allegedly heard Lincoln as "a caller
>at the White House." Years later, two old-timers claimed they had
>heard Lincoln say it in an 1856 address in Illinois, but a news
>account of the speech didn't mention it. The Fehrenbachers give the
>old-timers' recollections a D. The evidence, the scholars say,
>"suggests that this is a case of reminiscence echoing folklore or
>fiction."
--
/Jonathan Lundell.
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