More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 22, 2017 - February 22, 2018
Born and bred a member of the leather-aproned class,
he had faith in the wisdom of the common man
“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”2
Gossip can also, he noted, promote virtue, as some people are motivated more by fear of public humiliation than they are by inner moral principles. “ ‘What will the world say of me if I act thus?’ is often a reflection strong enough to enable us to resist the most powerful temptation to vice or folly.
He was a temperate man who nevertheless enjoyed the joviality of taverns.
halfway to Concord
“as nimble as a bee in a tarbarrel.”
he was a prophet of tolerance.
“grave men are taken by the common people for wise men.”
“He that drinks his cider alone, let him catch his horse alone.”
Tocqueville came to the conclusion that there was an inherent struggle in America between two opposing impulses: the spirit of rugged individualism versus the conflicting spirit of community and association building.
Like Franklin, the Freemasons were dedicated to fellowship, civic works, and nonsectarian religious tolerance.
He did concede, however, that she had a right to be displeased that they did not admit women.6
“A virtuous heretic shall be saved before a wicked Christian.”
“He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”16
Franklin was generally non-ideological, indeed allergic to anything smacking of dogma. Instead, he was, as in most aspects of his life, interested in finding out what worked.
“Slaves also pejorate the families that use them; white children become proud, disgusted with labor.”
Looking back on it near the end of his life, Franklin was convinced that the acceptance of his Albany Plan could have prevented the Revolution and created a harmonious empire.
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
“There had been almost no famous autobiographies before Franklin, and he had no models,”
His book was the first masterpiece of autobiography by a self-made man.”
Among Franklin’s cards was his fame, and he was among a long line of statesmen, from Richelieu to Metternich to Kissinger, to realize that with celebrity came cachet, and with that came influence.
“He knew how to be impolite without being rude.”
Better than most other diplomats in the nation’s history, he understood that America’s strength in world affairs would come from a unique mix that included idealism as well as realism.
“In colonial America it was sinful to look idle, in France it was vulgar to look busy.”3
‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ is, I suppose, to be understood in the other world, for in this they are frequently cursed.”
Franklin believed that science should be pursued initially for pure fascination and curiosity, and then practical uses would eventually flow from what was discovered.
In America, he said, “people do not enquire of a stranger, What is he? but, What can he do?”
“We are sent hither to consult, not to contend, with each other,”
“We are making experiments in politics,”
“A stand for compromise,” Oberg points out, “is not the stuff of heroism, virtue, or moral certainty. But it is the essence of the democratic process.”34
when a town in Massachusetts named itself Franklin in 1785 and asked him to donate a church bell, he told them to forsake the steeple and build a library, for which he sent “books instead of a bell, sense being preferable to sound.”
the man who retired from business at 42, dedicated himself to civic and scientific endeavors, gave up much of his public salaries, eschewed getting patents on his inventions, and consistently argued that the accumulation of excess wealth and the idle indulgence in frivolous luxuries should not be socially sanctioned.
but the concept of good-natured religious tolerance was in fact no small advance for civilization in the eighteenth century. It was one of the greatest contributions to arise out of the Enlightenment,
Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies.
he snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.
Indeed, the roots of much of what distinguishes the nation can be found in Franklin: its cracker-barrel humor and wisdom; its technological ingenuity; its pluralistic tolerance; its ability to weave together individualism and community cooperation; its philosophical pragmatism; its celebration of meritocratic mobility; the idealistic streak ingrained in its foreign policy; and the Main Street (or Market Street) virtues that serve as the foundation for its civic values.
