Whatever You Are Be A Good

This quote has no verified connection to Abraham Lincoln. Quote Investigator traced the saying to the Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, based on a memoir by Laurence Hutton recounting advice Thackeray gave him as a boy: "Whatever you are, be a good one." The earliest attribution to Lincoln appeared in a 1946 quotation anthology — more than 80 years after his death — with no primary source cited. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln does not contain the phrase.