Wit & Attitude Quote by Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln’s line is a pressure valve disguised as folksy arithmetic. It doesn’t thunder like a battlefield address; it counts. By breaking “the people” into fractions and time into intervals, he turns democratic legitimacy into something measurable, almost inevitable. The rhetoric is shrewd: he concedes that deception is not only possible but routine. Leaders, parties, newspapers, demagogues - all can win temporary victories in perception. The comfort comes from the final clause, where the math snaps shut: total, permanent fraud is unsustainable.

That subtext matters in a mid-19th-century America fractured by slavery, partisan media, and the accelerating machinery of persuasion. Lincoln is speaking to a public learning, in real time, that mass politics can be manipulated. The sentence doesn’t pretend voters are saints; it assumes they’re distractible, tribal, and sometimes willingly fooled. The hope is structural, not sentimental: pluralism and time are the antidotes. Even if one bloc is captured by a lie, other blocs resist; even if a lie dominates one season, reality reasserts itself later.

It also carries a warning to power. You can govern by spin for a news cycle, maybe for an election, but not as a permanent substitute for competence and truth. Read that way, it’s less a reassurance than a deadline: eventually, consequences educate. In Lincoln’s hands, “the people” aren’t an ideal - they’re a final audit.