WASHINGTON — In celebration of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican National Committee sent out a tweet Sunday with a quote.
The only problem is Lincoln might have never said the phrase.
Mashable, Gizmodo, The Hill and other publications called out the party for incorrectly attributing the quote to Lincoln.
Quote Investigator found “no substantive evidence that Lincoln used the expression.”
“Some quotation references attributed the remark to Adlai Stevenson II, who was the governor of Illinois and a Democratic presidential nominee,” the website said. “Indeed, Stevenson did deploy a version of this adage in speeches as early as 1952.”
“But the earliest appearance of this notion located by [Quote Investigator] was in an advertisement in 1947 for a book about aging by Edward J. Stieglitz,” the website said. “In February 1949, a columnist in the Hartford Courant newspaper of Connecticut credited the adage to Stieglitz.”
Lincoln was born on Feb. 12, 1809, in Hodgenville, Ky., and served as the 16th president from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865.
