“On peut tromper quelques hommes…”

According to Quote Investigator, the fourth volume of the Encyclopédie, issued in 1754 by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (shown here), contained this line:

…on peut tromper quelques hommes, ou les tromper tous dans certains lieux & en certains tems, mais non pas tous les hommes, dans tous les lieux & dans tous les siécles.

Those same lines had appeared (with an older spelling) in Jacques Abbadie’s Traité de la Vérité de la Religion Chrétienne, published in 1684.

A modern English translation of those words is:

One can fool some men, or fool all men in some places and times, but not all men in all places and in all ages.

In the 1880s, some campaigners for Prohibition in America started to quote a different version:

You can fool all the people part of the time, or you can fool some people all the time, but you cannot fool all people all the time.

In our culture, certain historical figures are magnets for unattributed quotations: Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Dorothy Parker. For folksy political wisdom, Abraham Lincoln is one of those quote magnets. (As opposed to sober political wisdom, often attributed to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or another Founder.)

Because of that phenomenon, within just a few years authors and speakers were crediting Lincoln with that saying about fooling some of the people all of the time. Nothing of the sort appears in any of his writings, nor in any memoir about him until decades later.

Instead, that piece of wisdom has its roots in the French Enlightenment.