“People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.”— Abraham Lincoln
Obviously this is a dumb and immoral attitude, but some of the context is funny. The statement is first of all a slight misquotation of words attributed to Lincoln by the early self-help author Orison Swett Marden in a 1917 book called How to Get What You Want. Marden was part of a movement espousing the idea that all disease is mental in origin and anybody can get what they want by thinking the right thoughts. He claimed that Abraham Lincoln said “folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Whether or not Lincoln really said it, that more measured statement has been altered and made more extreme and also much more widely circulated by the usual process, while the always dubious attribution to Lincoln has of course been preserved. Perhaps capping off the joke is the fact that much of this sloppiness is riding the coattails of someone whose real words include such gems as: “I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
