ANOTHER FAKE QUOTE FROM CONSERVATIVES

Conservatives have a habit of attributing ideologically pleasing quotes to historical figures THAT TURN OUT TO BE FALSE and scarce at Crooks & Liars finds another one:

What caught my ear, however, was the line he uses and attributes to Abraham Lincoln:

You don't help the poor by hurting the rich.

Republicans have been using it for decades, most famously by Ronald Reagan at the 1992 Republican National Convention, when he said in his speech:

I heard those speakers at that other convention saying "we won the Cold War" -- and I couldn't help wondering, just who exactly do they mean by "we?" And to top it off, they even tried to portray themselves as sharing the same fundamental values of our party! What they truly don't understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln: "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves."

None of which Abraham Lincoln ever said.

Those axioms were from one Rev. William John Henry Boetcker, a now obscure historical figure but in 1916 the director of Citizens' Industrial Alliance, which later became the Citizens' Alliance, a pro-employer organization notable for its strike breaking, anti-union efforts in the early part of the twentieth century.
Snopes details this authoritatively here.