evidence: It wasn't a serious political gaffe, but it was awkward. On Feb. 12, the Republican National Committee tweeted a picture of the Lincoln Memorial along with the quote, "'And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count; it's the life in your years' — Abraham Lincoln." You'd have figured the party of Lincoln would have come up with something a little more consequential than an adage about staying sprightly in your declining years. It didn't sound very Lincolnesque, and people quickly pointed out that he never said anything of the sort. [...] The origins of these sayings are usually murky — with quotations, even the originals aren't original. On his website, O'Toole traced the adage that the RNC tweeted back to an ad for a 1947 book on aging gracefully by a gerontologist named Edward Stieglitz. But there's similar wording in a 1910 advertisement for a laxative called DeWitt's Little Early Risers that promised to add years to your life and life to your years. It wasn't until around 2000 that the remark attached itself to Lincoln.