The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself.” (Benjamin Franklin Quotes)
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Franklin and his petition were roundly denounced by the defenders of slavery, most notably Congressman James Jackson of Georgia, who declared on the House floor that the Bible had sanctioned slavery and, without it, there would be no one to do the hard and hot work on plantations.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Franklin asserted his conservatism more forcefully. Most notable was an anonymous piece entitled “On the Laboring Poor,” which he signed “Medius.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Franklin’s most important vision: an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“He was more comfortable exploring practical thoughts and real-life situations than metaphysical abstractions or deductive proofs.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“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
“In fact, these terms devised by Franklin are the ones we still use today, along with other neologisms that he coined to describe his findings: battery, charged, neutral, condense, and conductor.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Knowledge, he realized, “was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Mr. Franklin kept a horn book always in his pocket in which he minute all his invitations to dinner, and Mr. Lee said it was the only thing in which he was punctual”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Socrates’ method of building an argument through gentle queries, he “dropped my abrupt contradiction” style of argument and “put on the humbler enquirer” of the Socratic method. By asking what seemed to be innocent questions, Franklin would draw people into making concessions that would gradually prove whatever point he was trying to assert.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“The most dangerous hypocrite in a Commonwealth is one who leaves the gospel for the sake of the law. A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“The riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the quantity of silver and gold they possess.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“There was the mother who offered up three of her flock of sons, the Dutch surgeon who wanted to study bodies that had been blown apart, and the Benedictine monk who promised to pray for America if it would pay off his gambling debts.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Those who met with greater economic success in life were responsible to help those in genuine need; but those who from lack of virtue failed to pull their own weight could expect no help from society.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Whoever accustoms himself to pass over in silence the faults of his neighbors shall meet with much better quarter from the world when he happens to fall into a mistake himself.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
