I “love” reading.It makes me feel like I am swallowing up Christ, Homer, Confucius, Newton, Franklin, Socrates, Caesar, and the whole world into one gigantic invincible Sir Moffat. Mine is creative reading. I read building empires in mind. I pray I won’t read and read and forget to marry.

The primary leaders of the so-called founding fathers of our nation were not Bible-believing Christians; they were deists. Deism was a philosophical belief that was widely accepted by the colonial intelligentsia at the time of the American Revolution. Its major tenets included belief in human reason as a reliable means of solving social and political...

Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of ‘Virtual Velocity,’ the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth...

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

She discovered in a series of beautifully executed researches the fundamental distinction between carbons that turned on heating into graphite and those that did not. Further she related this difference to the chemical constitution of the molecules from which carbon was made. She was already a recognized authority in industrial physico-chemistry when she chose to...

When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with the enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God. For, as all right-thinking people were aware, lightning is sent by God to punish impiety or some other grave sin—the virtuous are never...

Fools make feasts and wise men eat them.

Ben Franklin said:”Early to bed and early to riseMake a man healthy wealthy and wise”Lately I have read the advice given to William Randolph Hearst, when a young man, by his father:”Go downtown at noon and rob the other fellows of what they have made during the morning.

Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, ‘the United States of...

Just as smiles often follow tears, the sun rose full and bright on the morning..

My thinking is Lincolnian rather than Jeffersonian, Teddy Rooseveltian rather than Franklin D. Rooseveltian.

As every circumstance relating to so capital a discovery as this (the greatest, perhaps, that has been made in the whole compass of philosophy, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton) cannot but give pleasure to all my readers, I shall endeavour to gratify them with the communication of a few particulars which I have...

Historically, when Americans don’t know what to do next, they go to Paris. Benjamin Franklin is like: ‘What am I going to do now? I’ll go to Paris!’

The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin’s.

He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.