
“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.”
No. 106 (23 March 1751)
The Rambler (1750–1752)
“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.”
No. 106 (23 March 1751)
The Rambler (1750–1752)
2010s, 2016 Democratic National Convention (2016)
“Oh God, without them [libraries], what have we? We have no past and we have no future.”
Mojave magazine (November 1990)
Speech in the House of Commons (21 July 1812), quoted in The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, Vol. XXIII (1812), column 1156
“Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers.”
Source: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
1780s, Memorandum to Abolitionists (1789)
in A Reminiscence of Project Ozma http://www.bigear.org/vol1no1/ozma.htm, Cosmic Search Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1979.
Letter to George Whitefield (19 June 1764), published in The Works of Benjamin Franklin (1856).
Epistles