evidence: Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward. And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. [...] I have got you together to hear what I have written down. I do not wish your advice about the main matter for that I have determined for myself. Attributed to President Abraham Lincoln. Salmon P. Chase, diary entry for September 22, 1862, Diary and Correspondence of Salmon P Chase, p. 88 (1903, reprinted 1971). According to the Chase account, Lincoln spoke these words at a cabinet meeting he had called to inform the members of his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. This quotation is also used in Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, p. 584 (1939). Although these words are not used, the same thought is conveyed in the diary of another member of Lincoln's cabinet, Gideon Welles. See his diary entry for the same date in Diary of Gideon Welles, vol. 1, pp. 142-43 (1911). [...] And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count.