Leadership Quote by Benjamin Franklin

Franklin’s line is a moral scalpel disguised as homespun advice: it cuts poverty loose from disgrace, then turns the blade on the only part he thinks is truly blameworthy - the reflex to hide. The phrasing matters. “Having been poor” frames poverty as a condition that can be temporary, a chapter rather than a character. “No shame” doesn’t romanticize hardship; it simply refuses to treat economic misfortune as evidence of weak fiber. Then comes the pivot: “but being ashamed of it, is.” He relocates shame from circumstance to posture, from what happened to you to what you do with it.

The subtext is pure Franklin: status is useful, dignity is nonnegotiable, and self-respect is a kind of civic technology. In a world where credit, reputation, and social standing functioned like infrastructure, admitting you’d been poor could be risky. Franklin is offering an ethic that’s also a survival strategy: don’t let embarrassment make you dishonest, servile, or performatively “respectable.” Shame, he implies, breeds bad politics and bad economics - the quiet compromises, the grifts, the cruelty toward people still stuck where you once were.

Context sharpens it. Franklin was the archetypal self-made printer turned statesman, writing for a society that prized industriousness and distrusted inherited idleness. The line flatters the upwardly mobile while challenging their worst instinct: to launder their origin story once the money arrives. He’s not absolving poverty; he’s absolving the poor, and warning the newly comfortable not to confuse their bank balance with their worth.