Franklin Quotes

• For years, I've had a hankering for the portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Duplessis. Franklin is credited with so many inventions: the postal system, lightning rods, the constitution. He was a rock star before there was such a thing.

  

  Jon Bon Jovi
  • Rock
  • Star
  • Constitution

• One has to say that they [Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt] were pioneering to some extent. They didn't know that some of the housing projects that they were putting up for the poor were going to turn into crack dens and rapists' bowers and things of that sort, which they have since become. But you can't always foresee the future. I'm sure their intentions were the best.

  

  William A. Rusher
  • Projects
  • Intention
  • Housing

• I used to let the olde english 8- suds bubble in the last car of the Franklin Avenue shuttle

  

  Lawrence "Kris" Parker Boogie Down Productions
  • Car
  • Rap
  • Lasts

• Being around people like Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick and Roberta Flack, all these greats, I was taught to listen and observe.

  

  Whitney Houston
  • People
  • Taught
  • Knights

• I want to sing like Aretha Franklin. Before her I wanted the technical ability of Ella Fitzgerald.

  

  Lena Horne
  • Sing
  • Inability
  • Fitzherald

• My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a "bless the mark" at any spot, and to begin a sentence with "Lord" comma.

  

  E. B. White
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Style

• I think the most important thing I wanted to say at various times to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt was that it seemed so sad to me that - I really believe they loved each other and had a great deal of affection - but because of that early hurt in their marriage, there was a certain kind of distance from then on, until their deaths actually. So at times, I just wanted to push them together and say, "Come on, you guys! I know you love each other. This is crazy!"

  

  Doris Kearns Goodwin
  • Great
  • Believe
  • Important

• Some months earlier one of his oldest friends, Junto charter member Hugh Roberts, had written with news of the club and how the political quarreling in Philadelphia had continued to divide the membership. Franklin expressed hope that the squabbles would not keep Roberts from the meetings. “’tis now perhaps one of the oldest clubs, as I think it was formerly one of the best, in the King’s dominions; it wants but about two years of forty since it was established.” Few men were so lucky as to belong to such a group. “We loved and still love one another; we are grown grey together and yet it is too early to part. Let us sit till the evening of life is spent; the last hours were always the most joyous. When we can stay no longer ’tis time enough then to bid each other good night, separate, and go quietly to bed.

  

  H. W. Brands
  • Hope
  • Philadelphia
  • Membership

• Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn't know.

  

  Russell Baker
  • President
  • Succeed
  • Republican

• How many times it thundered before Franklin took the hint! How many apples fell on Newton's head before he took the hint! Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint.

  

  Robert Frost
  • Nature
  • Times
  • Hint

• People like Clyde McPhatter who came out of the black churches - like Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin - were all church singers who became great pop singers because gospel singing is very close to the blues.

  

  Ahmet Ertegun
  • People
  • Great
  • Black

• You know what we pride ourselves on that - although I wouldn't mind if my backside was a little smaller. But look at the original divas... take Aretha Franklin for example - I've seen her live in the States and she was mammoth, but she had that crowd under control and they doted on every movement she made! We're not little midgets but the music industry is not about that, it's about loving the music and respecting what you do.

  

  Kate DeAraugo
  • Music
  • Pride
  • Movement

• Fascist intellectuals, such as Ugo Spirito, made the round of conferences preaching the virtues of postcapitalism fascism and in fact tried to nudge the structure in a 'leftist' direction by calling for more collective control and even corporative ownership of the economy. Mussolini looked abroad to find that Franklin Roosevelt was merely seeking to emulate Italy's innovations.

  

  Charles S. Maier
  • Innovation
  • Virtue
  • Economy

• Since Social Security was established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 to ensure economic security for American workers, poverty among American seniors has dramatically declined.

  

  Steve Israel
  • Poverty
  • President
  • Security

• This country could use a president like Benjamin Franklin again.

  

  Michele Bachmann
  • Country
  • President
  • Franklin

• I don't think she ever had a single initiative at the United Nations that was not previously [vetted] by the people at the State Department, approved of, and authorized. She did manage to get around the world an awful lot, and find other parts of her vast slum project that needed repair. But I don't think that that was the main point. The main point was that she, after all, connoted Franklin Roosevelt, who by then was long dead, and had a certain prestige and power on that account.

  

  William A. Rusher
  • People
  • Thinking
  • Accounts

• The government is now in a position to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression of the 1930s - use a crisis of the times to create new institutions that will last for generations. To this day, we are still subsidizing millionaires in agriculture because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s.

  

  Thomas Sowell
  • Crisis
  • Farmers
  • Millionaire

• Capitalism can be alright, I mean Karl Marx didn't live to see what Roosevelt did with that Depression. He pulled everybody out of that Depression and everybody hated Franklin Roosevelt. He got into office four times. One after the other, with everybody saying, he can't get in again. Everybody voted for Roosevelt four times and he did a hell of a lot.

  

  David Bowie
  • Mean
  • Hell
  • Office

• There are bursts of things like Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan or Franklin Delano Roosevelt or same-sex marriage that change very much what we thought we were all about.

  

  Cass Sunstein
  • Franklin