Leadership Quote by Benjamin Franklin

Franklin doesn’t praise games as idle diversion; he sells them as maintenance. “Lubricate” is a deliberately unromantic verb, borrowed from workshops and printing presses, and it gives play the status of a practical intervention: reduce friction, prevent seizing, keep the machine running. Coming from a statesman of the Enlightenment, the line frames recreation as a civic technology, not a guilty pleasure. You can almost hear the argument he’s preempting: that time spent at cards, chess, or sport is time stolen from work, virtue, or public duty.

The intent is managerial. Franklin is talking to strivers - merchants, clerks, legislators - people who take exhaustion as a badge. He offers permission, but only on rational terms: games refresh the nervous system, sharpen attention, restore social ease. The body and the mind are paired to reject the puritan split where physical play is coarse and intellectual play is suspect. He’s also quietly defending sociability. Many “games” in Franklin’s world were communal, structured encounters that taught rules, negotiation, and self-control - skills that map neatly onto politics.

Context matters: an era of long working days, limited leisure, and a culture that often moralized rest. Franklin, master of maxims, flips that moral accounting. Play becomes preventive care and, by extension, a productivity strategy. The subtext is modern enough to feel like a startup wellness memo: you don’t relax to escape the system; you relax to keep performing inside it. That’s the sharpness of the line - it sanctifies pleasure while keeping it on a leash.