Benjamin Franklin Quotes

“Another time, he was playing [chess] with his equal, the Duchess of Bourbon, who made a move that inadvertently exposed her king. Ignoring the rules of the game, he promptly captured it. "Ah," said the duchess, "we do not take Kings so." Replied Franklin in a famous quip: "We do in America.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“the best way to serve God was doing good to others.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“no “natural or religious reason [for] the distinction of men into kings and subjects.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“It would be vain, he wrote, for any person to insist that “all the doctrines he holds are true and all he rejects are false.” The same could be said of the opinions of different religions as well. They should be evaluated, the young pragmatist said, by their utility: “I think opinions should be judged by their influences and effects; and if a man holds none that tend to make him less virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded that he holds none that are dangerous, which I hope is the case with me.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“According to a tale recorded by James McHenry of Maryland, he made his point in a pithier way to an anxious lady named Mrs. Powel, who accosted him outside the hall. What type of government, she asked, have you delegates given us? To which he replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“As Claude-Anne Lopez notes, “In colonial America it was sinful to look idle, in France it was vulgar to look busy.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“He knew how to be impolite without being rude.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“As Franklin recounted: He composed it in these words, “John Thompson, hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money,” with a figure of a hat subjoined. But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments. The first he showed it to thought the word “Hatter” tautologous, because followed by the words “makes hats,” which showed he was a hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word “makes” might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats . . . He struck it out. A third said he thought the words “for ready money” were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. Everyone who purchased expected to pay. They were parted with; and the inscription now stood, “John Thompson sells hats.” “Sells hats!” says his next friend; “why, nobody will expect you to give them away. What then is the use of that word?” It was stricken out, and “hats” followed, the rather as there was one painted on the board. So his inscription was reduced ultimately to “John Thompson,” with the figure of a hat subjoined.”37”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” Weekly Standard, Oct. 23, 2000, 31. The word “meritocracy” is an argument-starter, and I have employed it sparingly in this book. It is often used loosely to denote a vision of social mobility based on merit and diligence, like Franklin’s. The word was coined by British social thinker Michael Young (later to become, somewhat ironically, Lord Young of Darlington) in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy (New York: Viking Press) as a dismissive term to satirize a society that misguidedly created a new elite class based on the “narrow band of values” of IQ and educational credentials. The Harvard philosopher John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 106, used it more broadly to mean a “social order [that] follows the principle of careers open to talents.” The best description of the idea is in Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), a history of educational aptitude tests and their effect on American society. In Franklin’s time, Enlightenment thinkers (such as Jefferson in his proposals for creating the University of Virginia) advocated replacing the hereditary aristocracy with a “natural aristocracy,” whose members would be plucked from the masses at an early age based on “virtues and talents” and groomed for leadership. Franklin’s idea was more expansive. He believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed as best they could based on their diligence, hard work, virtue, and talent. As we shall see, his proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania (in contrast to Jefferson’s for the University of Virginia) were aimed not at filtering a new elite but at encouraging and enriching all “aspiring” young men. Franklin was propounding a more egalitarian and democratic approach than Jefferson by proposing a system that would, as Rawls (p. 107) would later prescribe, assure that “resources for education are not to be allotted solely or necessarily mainly according to their return as estimated in productive trained abilities, but also according to their worth in enriching the personal and social life of citizens.” (Translation: He cared not simply about making society as a whole more productive, but also about making each individual more enriched.)”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“Instead, Franklin found “a good and faithful helpmate” who was frugal and practical and devoid of pretensions, traits that he later noted were far more valuable to a rising tradesman.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“he was practical about what he wanted in a wife. Deborah was rather plain, but she offered the prospect of comfort and domesticity.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“poet convinced both of his own talent and of the need to be self-indulgent in order to be a great artist.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“In doing so, he learned one of his pragmatic lessons about jealousy and modesty: he found that people were reluctant to support a “proposer of any useful project that might be supposed to raise one’s reputation.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“While gambling at checkers with some shipmates, he formulated an “infallible rule,” which was that “if two persons equal in judgment play for a considerable sum, he that loves money most shall lose; his anxiety for the success of the game confounds him.” The rule, he decided, applied to other battles; a person who is too fearful will end up performing defensively and thus fail to seize offensive advantages.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“the removal of all royal governments in the colonies. Patriotic”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“The new Pennsylvania Fireplaces, as he called them, were initially somewhat popular, at £5 apiece, and papers around the colonies were filled with testimonials. “They ought to be called, both in justice and gratitude, Mr. Franklin’s stoves,” declared one letter writer in the Boston Evening Post. “I believe all who have experienced the comfort and benefit of them will join with me that the author of this happy invention merits a statue.” The governor of Pennsylvania was among the enthusiastic, and he offered Franklin what could have been a lucrative patent. “But I declined it,” Franklin noted in his autobiography. “As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.” It was a noble and sincere sentiment.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“I want much to hear how that tea is received,” Franklin worriedly wrote a friend in late 1773. Parliament had added to the indignity of its continued tariff on tea by passing new regulations that gave the corrupt East India Company a virtual monopoly over the trade. Franklin urged calm, but the radicals of Boston, led by Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty, did not. On December 16, 1773, after a mass rally in the Old South Church, some fifty patriots disguised as Mohawk Indians went down to the wharves and dumped 342 chests of tea worth £10,000 into the sea.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“The Armonica: Among the most amusing of his inventions was a musical instrument he called the armonica. It was based on the common practice of bored dinner guests, and some musicians, of producing a resonant tone by moving a wet finger around the rim of a glass. Franklin attended a concert in England of music performed on wineglasses, and in 1761 he perfected the idea by taking thirty-seven glass bowls of different sizes and attaching them to a spindle. He rigged up a foot pedal and flywheel to spin the contraption, which allowed him to produce various tones by pressing on the glass pieces with his wet fingers. In a letter to an Italian electrician, Franklin described the new instrument in minute detail. “It is an instrument,” he said, “that seems peculiarly adapted to Italian music, especially that of the soft and plaintive kind.” Franklin’s armonica was quite a rage for a while. Marie Antoinette took lessons on it, Mozart and Beethoven wrote pieces for it, and its haunting tones became popular at weddings. But it tended to produce melancholia, perhaps from lead poisoning, and it eventually went out of fashion.19”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“The Cause of Colds: Although germs and viruses had yet to be discovered, Franklin was one of the first to argue that colds and flu “may possibly be spread by contagion” rather than cold air. “Traveling in our severe winters, I have often suffered cold sometimes to the extremity only short of freezing, but this did not make me catch cold,” he wrote the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush in 1773. “People often catch cold from one another when shut up together in close rooms, coaches, etc., and when sitting near and conversing so as to breathe in each other’s transpiration.” The best defense was fresh air. Throughout his life, Franklin liked good ventilation and open windows, even in the midst of winter.14”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“The result was one of Franklin’s most delightful literary creations: the portrait he painted of his younger self. The novelist John Updike has memorably called it an “elastically insouciant work, full of cheerful contradictions and humorous twists—a fond look back upon an earlier self, giving an intensely ambitious young man the benefit of the older man’s relaxation.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“This was obviously directed at an audience beyond that of his son, who was already 40 and the governor of New Jersey. There was, however, a subtext directed at him: William had taken on airs since becoming a governor, and he was far more enamored of the aristocracy and establishment than his father. The autobiography would be a reminder of their humble origins and a paean to hard work, thrift, shopkeeping values, and the role of an industrious middle class that resisted rather than emulated the pretensions of the well-born elite.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“I am . . . a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country; and the least appearance of an encroachment on those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil exceedingly. I have likewise a natural inclination to observe and reprove the faults of others, at which I have an excellent faculty.” It was as good a description of the real Benjamin Franklin—and, indeed, of a typical American—as is likely to be found anywhere.37”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“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”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“America could not be subjugated by British troops, he argued, and it soon would be strong enough to win its own independence. If that happened, Britain would be sorry that it missed the opportunity to create a system of imperial harmony. To make his point, he published a parable in January 1770 about a young lion cub and a large English dog traveling together on a ship. The dog picked on the lion cub and “frequently took its food by force.” But the lion grew and eventually became stronger than the dog. One day, in response to all the insults, it smashed the dog with “a stunning blow,” leaving the dog “regretting that he had not rather secured its friendship than provoked its enmity.” The parable was “humbly inscribed” to Lord Hillsborough.45”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“spend most of his time so that he may glorify God by doing good for others, and getting of good for himself.” The Lord, quite conveniently, smiled”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“In one letter he also came up with a very specific scheme for using dogs as scouts. “They should be large, strong and fierce,” he wrote, “and every dog led in a slip strong to prevent them tiring themselves by running out and in and discovering the party by barking at squirrels.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“This was reflected in a ruminative letter on human nature he sent to his London friend Peter Collinson. “Whenever we attempt to mend the scheme of providence,” Franklin wrote, “we had need be very circumspect lest we do more harm than good.” Perhaps even welfare for the poor was an example. He asked whether “the laws peculiar to England which compel the rich to maintain the poor have not given the latter a dependence.” It was “godlike” and laudable, he added, “to relieve the misfortunes of our fellow creatures,” but might it not in the end “provide encouragements for laziness”? He added a cautionary tale about the New Englanders who decided to get rid of blackbirds that were eating the corn crop. The result was that the worms the blackbirds used to eat proliferated and destroyed the grass and grain crops.”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

“In addition to such topics of debate, Franklin laid out a guide for the type of conversational contributions each member could usefully make. There were twenty-four in all, and because their practicality is so revealing of Franklin’s purposeful approach, they are worth excerpting at length:”
― Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life