Feb 19, 20203 min read

Benjamin Franklin: Best 21 Quotes For You

Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don't have brains enough, to be honest.
The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all others, charity.
Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.
He who would trade liberty for some temporary security deserves neither liberty nor security.
Little minds think and talk about people. Average minds think and talk about things and actions. Great minds think and talk about ideas.
When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn. When you're down to nothing, God is up to something. The faithful see the invisible, believe the incredible and then receive the impossible. Where liberty dwells there is my country.
This [the U.S. Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.
It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.
Make yourself sheep and the wolves will eat you.
We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.
Common sense is something that everyone needs, few have, and none think they lack.
The noblest question in the world is: 'What good may I do in it?'
The rapid progress of the sciences makes me sorry, at times, that I was born so soon. Imagine the power that man will have over matter, a few hundred years from now. We may learn how to remove gravity from large masses and float them over great distances. Agriculture will double its produce with less labour. All diseases will surely be cured... even old age. If only the moral sciences could be improved as well. Perhaps men would cease to be wolves to one another... and human beings could learn to be human.
Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
Take the money in your wallet and invest it in your mind. And in return, your mind will fill up your wallet!
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know... Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech, a thing terrible to traitors.
There are two ways to increase your wealth. Increase your means or decrease your wants. The best is to do both at the same time.
Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.
Common sense without education is better than education without common sense.
I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion about the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.
Genius is the ability to hold one's vision steady until it becomes reality.