“I've been duped,” Sales said after the Lee Newspapers State Bureau provided articles showing these quotes were falsely attributed to Lincoln. “I got them off the Internet.”
Because the quotes came from the Internet, Sales said he said was careful in his speech to say the remarks were “attributed” to Lincoln and didn't directly say that Lincoln said them.
“It wasn't my intention to mislead,” Sales said.
Ironically, Sales said, some of his fellow House Republicans liked the quotations so much that they have requested copies of them. On Thursday, he made copies of the articles explaining that Lincoln never said the remarks.
The quotes are a series of “cannot” statements attributed to Lincoln, such as:
- “You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.”
- “You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.”
- “You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred.”
- “You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.”
In an Internet article titled, “Lincoln Never Said That,” the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency said these sayings were written by William J.H. Boetcker, a Presbyterian minister and outspoken political conservative who lived from 1873 to 1962.
In 1916, Boetcker wrote a pamphlet called “The Ten Cannots,” with the 10 sayings now misattributed to Lincoln, including the eight used by Sales in his speech Monday.
In 1942, a political group, the Committee for Constitutional Government, published a brochure with an authentic quote from Lincoln on one side and a list of Boetcker's adages on the other, credited to the minister, according to a 1990 book, “They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes and Misleading Attributions,” by Paul F. Boller and John George.
“The publications of Lincoln's and Boetcker's words together, however, caused someone - erroneously or deliberately - to attribute Boetcker's maxims to Lincoln,” the book's authors said.
“The mistake of crediting Lincoln for having been the source of ‘The Ten Cannots' has been repeated many times since, most notably by Ronald Reagan in a speech he gave to the 1992 Republican convention in Houston,” the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which itself has been the occasional recipient of misinformation.
Regardless of who actually wrote the “The Ten Cannots,” Sales said it doesn't lessen the value of the message.
Sales said his grandfather gave him a sheet of paper 35 to 40 years ago with these quotations attributed to Lincoln, but that he eventually misplaced it. He went searching on the Internet for the quotations to use in his opening day speech.
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June wrote on Jan 30, 2009 6:18 PM: