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Abe Lincoln

“This is highly metaphysical, as my old law partner, Billy Herndon, would say.”

President Abraham Lincoln, according to Gore Vidal’s historical novel, Lincoln, addressing his Secretary of Treasury’s “personal desire to have printed on […] bank notes […] ‘In God we Trust’”:

“Well,” said Lincoln, getting to his feet, “if you are going to put a Biblical tag on the greenback, I would suggest that of Peter and John: ‘Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee.’”

Gore Vidal, Lincoln (1984), chapter six.

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