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You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all of the people all the time

Abraham Lincolndisputed·Lincoln's Yarns and Stories, ed. Alexander K. McClure·1901

Attribution contested

No contemporaneous record of Lincoln saying this survives. It first appears in recollections published decades after his death, and has also been credited to P. T. Barnum. Even the wording is unstable: this is McClure's 1901 text, which differs from the version usually quoted today. Treat the phrasing as the compiler's, not Lincoln's.

It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.

Epictetusdisputed·The Encheiridion, in A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus (trans. George Long)·1888

Attribution contested

The fifth maxim is the source of the modern slogan it is not what happens to you but how you react to it, which translates nothing Epictetus wrote and has no attested author. The paraphrase stops halfway. Epictetus opens by saying men are disturbed by their opinions about things rather than by the things, but he ends here -- taking the blame yourself is only the middle stage, and the finished man blames nobody at all.