Source: http://thinkexist.com/quotes/john_wycliffe/To my knowledge, no. But then again, you might want to check my knowledge.
Nope. This was Lincoln’s own rhetorical genius. The parallelism of prepositional phrases really emphasizes the stake the American population has in its government.
Will follow the thread.
Source: http://thinkexist.com/quotes/john_wycliffe/Apparently it was just a bunch of meaningless drivel to Lincoln, considering the fact that he was denying a segment of people from exercising their freedom.
‘For example, who said “government of the people, by the people, for the people”? Lincoln, right? Well, yes, but Theodore Parker had also said before Lincoln that the “great political idea of America” is “a government of all, for all, and by all.” At the end of the first volume of his Parker biography, Dean Grodzins thus credits Parker with coining the phrase that was immortalized in the Gettysburg Address. But a Hungarian historian I read recently, Steven Bela Vardy, credits Lajos Kossuth, the great Hungarian revolutionary, as Lincoln’s inspiration. In 1852, while touring the United States, Kossuth said democracy was “All for the people, and all by the people. Nothing about the people, without the people,” a construction that Vardy says was “borrowed in a slightly altered form by President Lincoln.” It’s not impossible: Lincoln was a fervent admirer of Kossuth during his tour, as was Parker. But how could such a question really be settled? And how would we set the bounds for the questioning? (Who first started referring to “the people” with a definite article? And how far back in the Western canon can we trace the habit of stringing the prepositions “for,” “by,” and “of” together?) Wouldn’t answering these questions be like trying to figure out who first “said” the blues? ‘
http://modeforcaleb.blogspot.com/2004/11/plagiarism-article.html
Exerpt:
According to a biographer, in the late eighteenth century, playwright-politician Richard Sheridan (1751-1816) belonged to a London group called the Westminster Association for Reform, whose slogan was “Government for the people, through the people, by the people.” In 1794 an English book on America by one Thomas Cooper included this observation about it’s political system: “The government is the government of the people, and for the people.” Variations on this theme were common in nineteenth-century America. Thirty-three years before Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, Daniel Webster spoke of “people’s government, made for the people, made by the people and answerable to the people.”
President Lincoln, a Republican, coined the phrase “ government of the people, by the people, for the people”. The modern democRat party prefers the phrase “the people of the government, by the government, and for the governement”.
The same applies if Her Ankleship and the First Felon, or any other Democratic contender, return to the White House in 2009!
Today’s Democratic Party is as anti-American as any foreign enemy we have opposed since the Revolution. And they are closer to winning than any other of our past foes!