“We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.”
This is an anonymous modern quip which is a variant of a statement by G. Stanley Hall, in Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904):
: Men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely.
Misattributed
Letter to Joseph Huey (6 June 1753); published in Albert Henry Smyth, The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, volume 3, p. 145.
Epistles
Letter to Benjamin Vaughan http://www.2think.org/priestly.shtml (24 October 1788).
Epistles
Context: Remember me affectionately to good Dr. Price and to the honest heretic Dr. Priestly. I do not call him honest by way of distinction; for I think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They have the virtue of fortitude or they would not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot afford to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as that would give advantage to their many enemies; and they have not like orthodox sinners, such a number of friends to excuse or justify them. Do not, however, mistake me. It is not to my good friend's heresy that I impute his honesty. On the contrary, 'tis his honesty that has brought upon him the character of heretic.
Part I, p. 28.
The Autobiography (1818)
Context: I believe I have omitted mentioning that in my first Voyage from Boston, being becalm'd off Block Island, our People set about catching Cod and haul'd up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my Resolution of not eating animal Food and on this Occasion, I consider'd with my Master Tryon, the taking every Fish as a kind of unprovok'd Murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any Injury that might justify the Slaughter. All this seem'd very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great Lover of Fish, and when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc'd some time between Principle and Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs: Then, thought I, if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you. So I din'd upon Cod very heartily and continu'd to eat with other People, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable Diet. 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.
Franklin himself calls this an "old maxim" when he repeats it at page 48 http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page48.htm of his autobiography.
Franklin's recognition of this effect caused it to be named after him. Wikipedia, Ben Franklin Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_effect.
Misattributed
Claimed by American Fascist William Dudley Pelley in Liberation (February 3, 1934) to have appeared in notes taken at the Constitutional Convention by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney; reported as debunked in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 26-27, noting that historian Charles A. Beard conducted a thorough investigation of the attribution and found it to be false. The quote appears in no source prior to Pelley's publication, contains anachronisms, and contradicts Franklin's own financial support of the construction of a synagogue in Philadelphia. Many variations of the above have been made, including adding to "the Christian religion" the phrase "upon which this nation was founded, by objecting to its restrictions"; adding to "strangle that country to death financially" the phrase "as in the case of Spain and Portugal". See Michael Feldberg, "The Myth of Ben Franklin's Anti-Semitism, in Blessings of Freedom: Chapters in American Jewish History (2003), p. 134.
Misattributed
Appeal for the Hospital The Pennsylvania Gazette (8 August 1751).
1760s
March 1784 Information to Those Who Would Remove to America.
1780s
Part III, p. 98.
The Autobiography (1818)
Letter to Joseph Huey (6 June 1753); published in Albert Henry Smyth, The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, volume 3, p. 144.
Epistles
“Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.”
As quoted in Dictionary of Thoughts (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 22.
Decade unclear
Variant: Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.
“Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain — and most fools do.”
Attributed in various post-2000 works, but actually Dale Carnegie in How to Win Friends and Influence People p.14 http://books.google.com/books?id=yxfJDVXClucC&pg=PA14&dq=fool, published in 1936. (N.B. Carnegie is quoting Franklin immediately prior to writing this, so attribution could be due to a printing error in some edition).
Misattributed
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Misattributed to various people, including Albert Einstein and Mark Twain. An early occurrence was used as a teaching reference at University of California, Irvine in social science lectures in the later 1960s. Also found in a 1981 text from Narcotics Anonymous.
Misattributed
Speech in the Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (September 17, 1787); reported in James Madison, Journal of the Federal Convention, ed. E. H. Scott (1893), p. 741.
Constitutional Convention of 1787
"Some Good Whig Principles. Declaration of those Rights of the Community of Great Britain, without which they cannot be Free," as quoted in Memoirs of the Llife and Writings of Benjamin Franklin https://books.google.com/books?id=jmMFAAAAQAAJ (1818) by Benjamin Franklin and William Temple Franklin
Attributed