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.

Although widely attributed to Abraham Lincoln, this aphorism is not securely documented in Lincoln’s writings or speeches. It appears to have circulated in American political culture in the late 19th century as a piece of folk wisdom about public opinion and the limits of deception in democratic life. By the early 20th century it was commonly labeled “Lincoln” in newspapers and quotation collections, reflecting a broader tendency to attach memorable political maxims to revered national figures. Modern Lincoln scholarship generally treats the attribution as doubtful or unproven because no contemporary Lincoln-era source has been identified that records him saying or writing it.

The saying argues that deception has structural limits: a manipulator may succeed temporarily or with a subset of an audience, but sustained, universal deception is impossible. Its force comes from a democratic premise—public judgment is distributed across many minds and experiences, so falsehoods eventually encounter contradiction, evidence, or competing testimony. The line is often invoked in politics and media ethics as a warning against propaganda and as a reassurance that truth has a cumulative advantage over time. Even if the Lincoln attribution is shaky, the sentiment aligns with a broader 19th‑century faith in an informed public and the eventual self-correction of open societies.