Benjamin Franklin Quotes

No one can speak well, unless he thoroughly understands his subject.

Knowledge is the only elegance.

His locked, lettered, braw brass collar, Shewed him the gentleman and scholar.

Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.

Class is more than money. Class is also about knowledge.

Eloquence and wisdom are by no means the same thing. They are sometimes united, but not necessarily ; perhaps never when eloquence is the mere gift of nature rather than the slow result of nature and art conjoined. A ready supply of glittering language and an ardent conception, i. e. a fertile imagination, and quick feelings, united to a retentive memory—these are together quite sufficient to make an orator, but by no means to make a wise man; to make a speaker or even a leader in a popular assembly, but not necessarily a statesman.

We can be knowledgable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.

Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.

Certainly I was relatively a refined person. No way a tramp.

A man can be valued through his sayings.

Regan’s greatness as a rhetorician was in his delivery not in the content of what he said as with Churchill and Roosevelt.

I used to recite my speeches walking up a hill. It gives you wind power. I could throw fifty-six pound words across the Grand Canyon.

Who knows most, doubts most.

I regard most of my speeches as opportunities to teach rather than traditional political speeches.

The gifts of nature are necessary; but they are not sufficient to make a complete orator without art and study.

After all, a learned man is often not much better off than a man who knows a great many commonplace people.

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

What a wise man knows seems so plain and simple to himself that he easily makes the mistake of thinking it to be so for others.

I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking

The wise are instructed by reason; ordinary minds by experience; the stupid, by necessity; and brutes by instinct.

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

No one, however smart, however well educated … is the suppository of all wisdom.

Unlike the current occupant of the White House [George W. Bush], he has no difficulty in orally extemporizing a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb.

The good education of youth has been esteemed by wise men in all ages as the surest foundation of happiness.