Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.
NUMBER:
110
AUTHOR:
Abraham Lincoln (1809–65)
QUOTATION:
I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.
ATTRIBUTION:
President ABRAHAM LINCOLN.—Francis Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, pp. 258–59 (1867).
See note at No. 731 about Carpenter’s stay at the White House.
President Richard M. Nixon used similar words about his plan for peace in an address to the nation on the war in Vietnam, November 3, 1969: “If it does succeed, what the critics say now won’t matter. If it does not succeed, anything I say then won’t matter.”—Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1969, p. 909.
