Abraham Lincoln’s wisdom in Tweets
June 29, 2009This is related to my post, Tweeting wisdom of the ages, attempting to debunk the notion that something less than 140 characters must be shallow. These are quotations from Abraham Lincoln that would fit in tweets:
It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.
The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
I should acknowledge that none of these quotes comes from the Lincoln speech we remember best, renowned for its brevity but still well over 140 characters, the Gettysburg Address: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
And this famous Lincoln quote also doesn’t fit under the Twitter 140-character limit. With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.
[...] Abraham Lincoln [...]
This post was criticized in the Abraham Lincoln Observer, a blog by Mike Kienzler, metro editor of the State Journal-Register in Springfield, Ill.: http://blogs.sj-r.com/alo/index.php/2009/07/01/when-your-mother-tells-you-she-loves-you/
Kienzler says two of the quotes above are “apparently bogus” and he is suspicious of the third. The apparently bogus quotes are the one about the ballot being stronger than the bullet and the advice about keeping quiet and looking stupid. He’s suspicious of the quote about pleasing all of the people all the time.
I’ll let you read his citations. He speaks far more authoritatively on this topic than I would presume to. Clearly Abraham Lincoln is an interest of his, appropriate for an editor from Springfield. He mocks me with the old newspaper cliché that if your mother tells you she loves you, you should check it out.
I will plead guilty of not doing original historical research on each of the quotations here. I also will note that Kienzler’s writing was flawed, too. He refers to this as a column. I no longer write a column. This is a blog. He also apparently didn’t check out the linked post that explained how I did check out the various quotations: http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2009/06/29/tweeting-wisdom-of-the-ages/
In the last paragraph of that post, which linked to this one as well as collections of tweetworthy quotes by other famous people, I explained that I checked the quotations against multiple sources. Google gives more than 10,000 hits for one of the quotes Kienzler calls bogus and more than 900 for the other. Most of the top hits are collections of quotations and historical articles. Of course, repetition of an error doesn’t make it correct.
I’m not going to check out whether Kienzler is right about whether Lincoln actually said these things. The truth is that when we’re dealing with the spoken words of historical figures, even contemporary accounts are at best someone’s notes and those vary widely, as this blog notes in telling about the varying contemporary accounts of what Lincoln said Gettysburg: http://abrahamlincolnblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/gettysburg-address-anniversary.html
I’d like to remind Kienzler about another thing he probably learned from a dead-tree editor: When you criticize someone, you offer them a chance to respond. That’s the journalistic principle of fairness. I will be sending him an email, inviting him to respond to this comment. He did not do the same when criticizing me.
Mr. Buttry:
One of the great things about the scary (to us journalists, anyway) new media environment is how easy it has become for readers to respond to, and frequently take issue with, what we write. I presumed that, as a blogger yourself — and yes, I understood that; my apologies for referring to you as a columnist — you wouldn’t need an invitation to comment in response to my post. I’m glad you did.
Of course, one of the great problems of that same new environment is that it’s also become far easier to pass on false information. Fake quotes by Abe aren’t the worst example of that — I think I vote for 9/11 conspiracy theorists or Obama birth “truthers” — but they’re the territory I work. It was discouraging to see some of them perpetuated by someone I thought should know better. That was the point of my post, and I stand by it.
Good luck.
Mike Kienzler
Thanks, Mike. I appreciate the correction, if not the snarky tone of your original post. I should have included my citation to the sources in each of my posts, not just in the parent post. I do find it interesting that I am being faulted for a presumption — that multiple collections of quotations would weed out the fake ones — by someone who relied on his own presumption — that I would somehow find and respond to your blog. I only learned of your blog because I noticed that it had steered some people to my blog (something I don’t always check). I learned something from this exchange. I hope you did, too.