So on this rainygray Chicago morning I'm shambling around the series of tubes looking for a timely anecdote for Friday's Executive Communication Report—the free weekly e-newsletter I write that you should subscribe to immediately for a hundred reasons I won't go into here—and I run across something Abraham Lincoln said, about writing:
In a lecture on “Discoveries and Inventions,” delivered in Jacksonville, Ill. Lincoln claimed that writing was number one:
Writing—the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye—is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination … great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space; and great, not only in its indirect benefits, but greatest help, to all other inventions.
I check the date of that lecture. It's February 11, 1859—exactly 150 years ago today.
Great thoughts from a great man.
Steve C.
Great thoughts from a great man.
Steve C.
Lincoln? Another Machiavelli.
Oh, David. Oh . . . Oh . . . David.
Oh, David. Oh . . . Oh . . . David.
Yeah, just so we’re clear – you did this one all on your own with no involvement from me!