"For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise"
About this Quote
Age, for Franklin, isn’t a victory lap; it’s an audit. The line carries the calm authority of someone who has watched certainty get embarrassed by facts. It’s also a strategic piece of political self-branding: the elder statesman presenting flexibility not as weakness but as earned discipline. In an era when public life prized firmness and “character,” Franklin smuggles in a radical claim: the respectable person is the one who revises.
The mechanics are sly. He doesn’t praise open-mindedness in the abstract; he frames it as being “obliged” to change. That word matters. It implies external pressure from “better information” and “fuller consideration,” as if reality itself issued a correction. He shifts the focus away from ego (“I was wrong”) toward process (“the evidence improved”). That’s a face-saving move, but it’s also an Enlightenment move: elevating reason and inquiry over inherited opinion.
Subtext: this is a manual for democratic argument before democracy had good software for it. Franklin is telling you how to disagree without turning disagreement into moral condemnation. If important subjects can be revisited, then opponents aren’t enemies; they’re people at different points in the same learning curve.
Context sharpens the stakes. Franklin lived through scientific revolutions, imperial wars, constitutional experiments. He negotiated, invented, compromised, and watched yesterday’s common sense become today’s liability. The quote quietly legitimizes pragmatism in governance: policies aren’t scripture; they’re hypotheses. In 1790, that’s not just humility. It’s a survival strategy for a new republic.
The mechanics are sly. He doesn’t praise open-mindedness in the abstract; he frames it as being “obliged” to change. That word matters. It implies external pressure from “better information” and “fuller consideration,” as if reality itself issued a correction. He shifts the focus away from ego (“I was wrong”) toward process (“the evidence improved”). That’s a face-saving move, but it’s also an Enlightenment move: elevating reason and inquiry over inherited opinion.
Subtext: this is a manual for democratic argument before democracy had good software for it. Franklin is telling you how to disagree without turning disagreement into moral condemnation. If important subjects can be revisited, then opponents aren’t enemies; they’re people at different points in the same learning curve.
Context sharpens the stakes. Franklin lived through scientific revolutions, imperial wars, constitutional experiments. He negotiated, invented, compromised, and watched yesterday’s common sense become today’s liability. The quote quietly legitimizes pragmatism in governance: policies aren’t scripture; they’re hypotheses. In 1790, that’s not just humility. It’s a survival strategy for a new republic.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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