Benjamin Franklin Quotes

It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.

Actually, no one is born honest or corrupt.

In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.

Men are always wicked at bottom unless they are made good by some compulsion.

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from Custom.

Man is almost always as wicked as his needs require.

Church members who buy and sell slaves and trade in such miserable people commit a sin. For these are people of the same nature as them rather than mere animals. Even though such slave trade is conducted by not only Jews, Turks, and Pagans, but so-called Christians, indeed, Dutchmen, as well. Reformed members should not taint themselves with such uncompassionate trade. Rather, they should act fully in fear of the Lord, in order that the money they make will be a blessing rather than a curse

The great corrupter of public man is the ego.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

We must challenge a culture that is based on too much meanness and not enough meaning.

The most important thing is culture.

Humanity is the child of religion.

Everyone cheats.

The more the audience and the society trusts an actor, the more the responsibility increases for the actor.

There are three points of doctrine the belief of which forms the foundation of all morality. The first is the existence of God; the second is the immortality of the human soul; and the third is a future state of rewards and punishments. Suppose it possible for a man to disbelieve either of these three articles of faith and that man will have no conscience, he will have no other law than that of the tiger or the shark. The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy.

Bad guys are not bad guys twenty-four hours a day.

A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.

Politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion.

False principles, which correspond with the bad as well as with the just aspirations of mankind, are a normal and necessary element in the social life of nations.

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

Everyone looks for the good, therefore everyone looks for God.

For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.

And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.

We do not need to be able to say what "human nature" is in order to be able to say that some training is "against human nature.