A fine genius in his own country is like gold in the mine.

A man is not completely born until he is dead.

If you want to be loved, love and be loveable.

Most men die from the neck up at age twenty-five because they stop dreaming.

Slavery is ...an atrocious debasement of human nature.

Virtue may not always make a Face handsome, but Vice will certainly make it ugly.

"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.