Benjamin Franklin
Printer, scientist and Founding Father, 1706–1790. 5 explained quotes.
Franklin's advice to Philadelphians on preventing house fires. It is now used about health, but it began as fire safety and led to the city's first volunteer fire company.
Read the full explanation →Small, regular spending adds up. A habit that seems too minor to matter can drain your money as surely as a big mistake.
Read the full explanation →A wry aside in a letter about the new U.S. Constitution. Franklin made it famous, but the joke was already in print more than seventy years earlier.
Read the full explanation →An hour spent idle is not free. If you could have been earning during that time, the wages you gave up are a real cost, on top of whatever you spent.
Read the full explanation →Written by Franklin for the Pennsylvania Assembly in a tax dispute with the colony's proprietors. It was a defense of the elected assembly's power to tax, not an argument against security measures.
Read the full explanation →No quotes match these filters yet. New quotes are added every week.
About Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin was a Philadelphia printer and publisher who became one of the most famous people of the eighteenth century. He proved that lightning is electricity, invented the lightning rod and bifocal glasses, helped draft the Declaration of Independence, negotiated the French alliance that helped win the Revolution, and signed the Constitution.
Franklin wrote under many pen names, and his Poor Richard’s Almanack filled its pages with sayings, many of them reworked from older proverbs. As a result he is credited with a vast number of quotes, some genuinely his, some borrowed and some invented long after his death, so his lines are worth checking against the Papers of Benjamin Franklin.
More lines by Franklin
Short quotes checked against their sources.
- “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”Poor Richard's Almanack (adapting an older English proverb), 1735
- “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”Attributed at the signing of the Declaration; first printed decades later