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Divided We Stand

Divided We Stand
New book about the 2020 election.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Obama's Spurious Lincoln Quotation

In his remarks to the House Democratic Caucus (the White House website called it “The House Democratic Congress” – talk about a sense of ownership), the president said:

I have the great pleasure of having a really nice library at the White House. And I was tooling through some of the writings of some previous Presidents and I came upon this quote by Abraham Lincoln: “I am not bound to win, but I’m bound to be true. I’m not bound to succeed, but I’m bound to live up to what light I have.”

The book he was consulting may have been They Never Said It, by Paul F. Boller and John George. If so, he missed what they said about the Lincoln passage: “This sounds like Honest Abe, but honesty compels admirers of Lincoln to admit that there is no documentary evidence for the statement.”