Benjamin Franklin Quotes

While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

How I longed to see these things; how I longed to see the Liberty Bell and walk on the streets where Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin had walked.

If the Christians who were alive in the 1770s behaved and believed like the Christians of today, there wouldn't be an America as we know it.

I'm so proud of myself. I thought, 'I've got to learn about American history.' I literally took two months off and watched every documentary known to man. I really didn't know Benjamin Franklin was so cool.

We know Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin as politicians, but they felt that science was something everyone should have a knowledge of.

Founding Fathers

United American Colonies

Philadelphia: The city where Washington slept and Franklin slept around.

In our history, America began with a French look.

The taverns were the headquarters of the American Revolution.

I'm often asked, 'Why didn't Benjamin Franklin ever become president?' My short, easy answer is: He died.

I'm very interested in the early American history, the time when the country came together.

[John] Adams never hid his jealousy and resentment of the other Founders, especially Benjamin Franklin.

The Founding Fathers were nothing more than a bunch of snobby English shits.

Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.

Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

No evidence or proof of the existence of a God has been found in the phenomena of nature, based on experience.

Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject.

Art is science in the flesh.

Perhaps more significant than his experience in Europe, though, was [John] Adams's experience in his own country, and his extensive reading on the history of the English constitution. In 1779, he had an opportunity to try out his ideas by framing the Massachusetts constitution.

For myself, I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man's knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill and in his personal knowledge and authority.

Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.

Mankind is a science that defies definitions.

I can't rightly say where deciding to write about the American Revolution came from; I had bits and pieces of information about the war and about the country at that time that I'd collected over the years and, of course, I'm comfortable in the woods, so, finally, it just all feel into place.

The great man of science, unless he is also a philosopher, ... deserves the title of genius as little as the man of action.