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Book: Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Quotes of Book: Benjamin Franklin: An American
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  1. Walter Isaacson _ Benjamin Franklin: An American

    What would have happened if Franklin had, in fact, received a formal academic education and gone to Harvard? Some historians such as Arthur Tourtellot argue that he would have been stripped of his "spontaneity," "intuitive" literary style, "zest," "freshness," and the "unclutteredness" of his mind. And indeed, Harvard has been known to
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  2. Walter Isaacson _ Benjamin Franklin: An American

    Knowledge, he realized, "was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue." So in the Junto, he began to work on his use of silence and gentle dialogue. One method, which he had developed during his mock debates with John Collins in Boston and then when discoursing with Keimer, was to pursue topics through soft, Socratic queries.
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  3. Walter Isaacson _ Benjamin Franklin: An American

    Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies.
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  4. Walter Isaacson _ Benjamin Franklin: An American

    The good men may do separately," he wrote, "is small compared with what they may do collectively.
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  5. Walter Isaacson _ Benjamin Franklin: An American

    There never was a good war or a bad peace."4
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  6. Walter Isaacson _ Benjamin Franklin: An American

    God is "all wise, all good, all powerful," he posited. Therefore, everything that exists or happens is with his consent. "What He consents to must be good, because He is good; therefore evil doth not exist." Furthermore, happiness existed only as a contrast to unhappiness, and one could not exist without the other. Therefore, they balanced out: "Since pain naturally and infallibly produces a pleasure in proportion to it, every individual creature must, in any state of life, have an equal quantity of each.
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  7. Walter Isaacson _ Benjamin Franklin: An American

    God is "all wise, all good, all powerful," he posited. Therefore, everything that exists or happens is with his consent. "What He consents to must be good, because He is good; therefore evil doth not exist.
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  8. Walter Isaacson _ Benjamin Franklin: An American

    Josiah practiced the art, which his son would perfect, of marrying public virtue with private profit: he made money by selling candles to the night watchmen he oversaw.
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  9. Walter Isaacson _ Benjamin Franklin: An American

    So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.
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  10. Walter Isaacson _ Benjamin Franklin: An American

    he did criticize his son for his weak and un-persuasive writing style. In reaction, the precocious young teen devised for himself a self-improvement course
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  11. Walter Isaacson _ Benjamin Franklin: An American

    he "dropped my abrupt contradiction" style of argument and "put on the humbler enquirer" of the Socratic method.
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  12. Walter Isaacson _ Benjamin Franklin: An American

    Being "disputatious," he concluded, was "a very bad habit" because contradicting people produced "disgusts and perhaps enmities.
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