Paintings and fightings are best seen at a distance.

Getting it done is my reward.

He that displays too often his wife and his wallet is in danger of having both of them borrowed.

"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.

There are three faithful friends - an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.

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

I never knew a man who was good at making excuses who was good at anything else.