A Great Improvisation Quotes

“It’s easy. Pretend to know what you don’t, and pretend not to know when you do. Hear what you don’t understand and don’t hear what you do. Promise what you cannot deliver, what you have no intention of delivering. Make a great secret of hiding what isn’t there. Plead you’re busy as you spend your time sharpening pencils. Speak profoundly to cover up your emptiness, encourage spies, reward traitors, tamper with seals, intercept letters, hide the ineptitude of your goals by speaking of them glowingly—that’s all there is to politics, I swear. —Beaumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“Helvétius’s maxims: “It is worth being wise only so long as one can also be foolhardy.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“What is optimism? Alas, it is the mania for pretending that all is right,
when in fact everything is wrong. —Voltaire, Candide”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“What good were these experiments?” went the skeptic’s question. To which Franklin replied, “What good is a new-born babe?” In some versions he continued: “He may be an imbecile, or a man of great intelligence. Let us wait for him to complete his studies before judging him.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“A few months since the idea of witches riding through the air upon a broomstick, and that of philosophers upon a bag of smoke, would have appeared equally impossible and ridiculous,”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“There was nothing to be gained by making a man feel unkind for having to refuse a favor, or weak in revealing his inability to do so.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“As a teenager he had observed that success bred presumption and that presumption bred inattention. On the other hand misfortune fostered care and vigilance, by which losses might be reversed.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“There are people whose defects become them, and others who are ill served by their good qualities. —La Rochefoucauld”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“Make a list of pros and cons and allow it to marinate for a few days. Gradually jettison the entries that equal each other—canceling out multiple arguments that amount to a single one in weight—and endorse the column in which a balance remains.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“In this world,” he reminded a French friend, “it is not faith that saves us, but defiance.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“Judging by the edicts passed to regulate commerce alone, Franklin stood ready to conclude that “an assembly of wise men is the greatest fool upon earth.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“In Europe pedigree might be all, “but it is a commodity that cannot be carried to a worse market than to that of America, where people do not enquire concerning a stranger, what is he? but what can he do?”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“When men of sober age travel, they gather knowledge which they may apply usefully for their country; but they are subject ever after to recollections mixed with regret; their affections are weakened by being extended over more objects; and they learn new habits which cannot be gratified when they return home. —Thomas Jefferson”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“Franklin was perfectly philosophical on the subject: “For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“He had come a long way since his conviction, as a twenty-year-old, that honesty could not be counterfeited.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“Resentment is a passion, implanted by nature for the preservation of the individual. Injury is the object which excites it. Injustice, wrong, injury excites the feeling of resentment, as naturally and necessarily as frost and ice excite the feeling of cold, as fire excites heat, and as both excite pain. A man may have the faculty of concealing his resentment, or suppressing it, but he must and ought to feel it. Nay he ought to indulge it, to cultivate it. It is a duty. —John Adams”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“In the only letter he wrote that Christmas, Franklin conceded that he no longer coveted the Brillon house as once he had. His feelings for his neighbor’s wife remained constant, however. If in her travels she was to meet the Holy Father, he hoped she might petition him for a repeal of the Ten Commandments. They were miserably inconvenient.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“Everyone Has Wisdom Enough to Manage the Affairs of His Neighbors”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“Believe me there’s no spiteful stupidity, no horror, no absurd story that one can’t get the idle-minded folk of a great city to swallow if one goes the right way about it—”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“quickly Franklin folded the owlish John Adams into his debilitating rounds, sweeping him off to meet the la Rochefoucauld family in their baronial home. He did so before Adams yet felt appropriately outfitted for any kind of Parisian outing. That anxiety would underline the difference between the two envoys, one of them self-conscious about his attire, the other confident that fashion would follow him, both of whom were right.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“We most often understand the value of time only when we are in a position of having to regret its loss,”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“Hutton and Franklin spent all of January 3 together, in the course of which Franklin evidently informed his old friend, “You have only left us the option of perishing by you or with you: we have chosen the latter alternative.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“He argued—in a line for which Jefferson would get the dubious credit, speaking of a different revolution—that “civil wars in the political systems, like bleeding to the human body, or thunderstorms in due season, are salutary.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“Franklin informed his caller that the colonies understood precisely what they were doing, “for we know that separated both countries must become weak; but there is this difference, Great Britain will always remain weak; America after a time, will grow strong.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“The motto over Chaumont’s door read, “Se sta bene non se muove,” which a later American tenant translated, overly literally, as “If you stand well, stand still.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“Beaumarchais sighed, consumed by his own labors, “politics only rewards success. Best efforts earn only a bitter smile.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“The Franklin known to the French, the Franklin who had briefly visited Paris in 1767 and 1769 was—in Voltaire’s description—the discoverer of electricity, a man of genius, a first name in science, a successor to Newton and Galileo.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“He is drunk at least 22 hours of every 24 and never without one or two whores in company.”)”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“John Jay would offer the best analysis later, to George Washington: “There is as much intrigue in this state house as in the Vatican, but as little secrecy as in a boarding school.”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

“a man who spoke no English, who would argue that whole conversations could be sustained in that language with the use of a single word (Goddamn),”
― Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America