Nineteenth-century abolitionist minister Theodore Parker inspired both Abraham Lincoln’s “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” two of the five quotations that now encircle the Oval Office’s new, sunshine-deficient rug. But Parker doesn’t get any credit on the rug, probably because Lincoln and King delivered his lines more eloquently, succinctly, and famously, and because rugs do not have footnotes. [WP]
