The varnishers and veneerers have been busily converting Abe into
a plaster saintto pump all his human weaknesses
out of him, and so leave him a mere moral apparition, a
sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost.
- H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken Of popular
perceptions of Abraham Lincoln. Quoted in Fred Hobson Mencken: A
Life (1994).