by Nomad
I stumbled across this Lincoln quote in the archives and I was stunned that I hadn't heard anything like it before. I have no doubt it is authentic since the source was a book published well over a hundred years ago. I thought it deserved a meme of its own so that it might reach a wider audience.
Doesn't this seem so very appropriate for our day and age? I just hope that we can take courage and take up the fight that our forefathers began.
I have been looking through the papers of Lincoln for this quote. It came from the Catch words of Patriotism by Wallace Rice. The book was printed in 1908.
Tracking the precise origin is a daunting task. However some skeptics refuse to believe anything that doesn't perfectly fit into their world view or what they have been taught in schools.
On the bright side, it has given me a chance to discover other equally fantastic Lincoln quotes like the one above. They seem to corroborate at least the general idea. (I will continue as long as my eyes hold out!)
Here is an excerpt from an August 1855 letter from Lincoln to Hon. George Robertson of Lexington Kentucky.
On the question of liberty as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were political slave of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that "all men are created equal" a self-evident truth, but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call call the same maxim "a self-evident lie."In another letter, this one from April 6th 1859, Lincoln salutes Thomas Jefferson:
The quote in the meme is very similar to that last sentence.The principle of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And uet they are denied and evaded with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them "glittering generalities." Another bluntly calls them "self-evident lies."And other insidiously argue that they apply to "superior races." These expression, differing in form, are identical in object and effect- the supplanting the principle of free government and restoring those of classification, caste and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people. They are the vanguard the miners and sappers of returning despotism. We must repulse them or they will subjugate us. This is a world of compensation: and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave.Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it. All honor to Jefferson- to the man... who had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there that today and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbinger of reappearing tyranny and oppression.