The only time a question should be asked is when all other possibilities of finding the answer for yourself have been eliminated.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

I am what I am and that's all that I am and if I'm supposed to be somebody else, why do I look like me?

We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that 'except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it' I firmly believe this; by our partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a by word down to future ages.

"We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it instead into an assertion of rationality. The scientific mind of Franklin drew on the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of David Hume and Gottfried Leibniz. In what became known as "Hume's Fork" the latters' theory distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact, and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition.

The poor have little; beggars, none; the rich, too much; enough, not one.

And whether you're an honest man, or whether you're a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.