Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705] - April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass 'armonica'. He formed both the first public lending library in America and first fire department in Pennsylvania. He was an early proponent of colonial unity, and as a political writer and activist he supported the idea of an American nation. As a diplomat during the American Revolution he secured the French alliance that helped to make independence of the United States possible.

Religion: Deist

Websites about Benjamin Franklin

• Full text of Benjamin Franklin`s Autobiography (1771-1788)
• Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary
• The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (The American Philosophical Society and Yale University)

Quotes by Benjamin Franklin

Men and melons are hard to know.

-= Poor Richard's Almanack =-

Would you live with ease, do what you out and not what you please.

-= Poor Richard's Almanack =-

He's a fool that makes his doctor his heir.

-= Poor Richard's Almanack =-

Fish and visitors smell in three days.

-= Poor Richard's Almanack =-

Keep they shop, and they shop will keep thee.

-= Poor Richard's Almanack =-

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

-= Poor Richard's Almanack =-

FAMILY: ... the conversation of ingenious men, give me no small pleasure; but at this time of life, domestic comforts afford the most solid satisfaction, and my uneasiness at being absent from my family, and longing desire to be with them, make me often sigh in the midst of cheerful company.

-= Letter to Debrah Franklin (21 Jan. 1758) =-

Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.

-= Poor Richard's Almanack =-

God helps them that help themselves

-= Poor Richard's Almanack =-

Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other.

-= Poor Richard's Almanack =-

He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.

-= Poor Richard's Almanack =-

The used key is always bright

-= Poor Richard's Almanack =-

PRIDE: There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat id won, stifle it, mortify it, as much as one pleases, it is still alive and will ever now than then peep out and show itself...

-= Autobiography (1784) P. 160. =-

Frugality is an enriching virtue, a virtue I never could acquire in myself, but I was once lucky enough to find it in a wife, who thereby became a fortune to me.

-= To Miss Alexander (24 June 1782) =-

I grew convinced that truth, sincerity, and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life.... Revelation had indeed, no weight with me as such; but I entertained an opinion that, though certain actions might not be bad because they were forbidden by it, or good because it commanded them, yet probably those actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial to us, in their own natures.

-= Autobiography (1771) pp. 114-115 =-

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