Parenting & Family Quote by Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln borrows authority while pretending he can’t. The feigned forgetfulness - “whose name I do not now remember” - is doing quiet political work: it lets him invoke the grandeur of classical wisdom without sounding like he’s lecturing the room. He’s a lawyer-president with a populist ear, and he knows that overt erudition can read as vanity. So he smuggles in the line like a found object, a proverb that belongs to everyone.

“Truth is the daughter of Time” is not just a comforting aphorism; it’s an argument for patience under pressure. In Lincoln’s world, “truth” isn’t merely a private virtue, it’s the public verdict history will render on policies, wars, and moral choices. Time, here, is the ultimate court of appeal: partisan noise fades, documents accumulate, consequences become undeniable. That framing is especially potent in a democracy at crisis temperature, when immediacy masquerades as certainty and propaganda competes with evidence.

The subtext also carries a warning. If truth arrives only with time, then the present is a foggy battlefield where people must act without full clarity - and still be judged later. Lincoln’s phrasing makes room for humility (“we may not see it yet”) while stiffening resolve (“it will be seen”). It’s rhetorical jiu-jitsu: he softens the ego of the speaker and hardens the claim itself. History will sort it out, he implies, and history tends to be less patient with excuses than with results.