“I like the Lincoln quote where he says…”
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For second time in the same number of weeks, Republican Kentucky senator and presidential candidate Rand Paul used a fake quote from an American historical figure. Last week BuzzFeed News noted Paul used a fake Patrick Henry in a speech in South Carolina, and this week Paul looks to have misattributed a quote to Abraham Lincoln.
"Yeah, and I think that could be extraordinary in some ways," Paul said when a host on WVJS noted he was a candidate "who wanted to give up power." Paul was discussing giving the president authority to make trade deals.
Paul zeroed in on a Lincoln quote he liked to emphasis the point.
"I like the Lincoln quote where he says, 'any man can stand adversity but if you want to test a man give him power.' And the test is whether the power goes to their head or they try to accumulate more," Paul said. "I think what we really need to get is leaders who want to preserve the power with both the people, and the Congress, and the states and not try to grab up too much power in Washington."
The Lincoln quote, as noted by Harold Holzer, one of the nation's foremost scholars on Lincoln, is fake. Holzer, who has written nearly-thirty books on Lincoln, said the quote was "totally spurious" and not uttered by Lincoln.
"Rand Paul is not the first," he added.
Gordon Leidner, another Lincoln author who served on the board of directors of the Abraham Lincoln Institute likewise concluded in a post that this was one of the things that "Abraham Lincoln did not say."
The earliest attribution of the quote to Lincoln appears to be a 1931 local newspaper article in Iowa. Since then the quote appears to have been used mostly in management, self-help, and quote books.
Paul previously used a fake Thomas Jefferson quote in his Senate acceptance speech.
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