Attributed to Abraham Lincoln by Enos Clarke, one of the seventy-member delegation of Radicals from Missouri, who met with Lincoln, September 30, 1863. This attribution was made by Clarke in an interview with Walter B. Stevens, who later published it in his Lincoln and Missouri, p. 100 (1916). All contemporary accounts indicate there were no reporters at this meeting. Lincoln's secretary, John Hay, took notes, but this statement is not in his notebooks. For that day's notes, see John G. Nicolay https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Self-esteem