The New Year Quote by Benjamin Franklin

Franklin lands a clean jab disguised as moral housekeeping: most people can tolerate the idea of self-improvement right up until it requires public honesty and sustained effort. The line splits virtue into two rarer virtues-courage to admit fault and resolution to correct it-and implies that the first is often performative while the second is painfully unglamorous. Owning your faults costs status. Mending them costs comfort. Franklin’s bite is that we routinely choose both.

The phrasing works because it frames self-critique as bravery, not shame. In a culture where reputation was currency and “character” carried civic weight, admitting error wasn’t therapeutic; it was political. Franklin, the pragmatist who wrote maxims for apprentices and statesmen alike, understood that moral talk is cheap unless it survives the grind of habit. “Resolution” is the Puritan-descended word doing the heavy lifting here: it’s not an epiphany, it’s a regimen.

Subtextually, the quote doubles as a warning to public men. In the revolutionary era and early republic, institutions were fragile and legitimacy depended on leaders who could correct course without collapsing into pride or denial. Franklin’s brand of Enlightenment skepticism shows up in “How few”: a statistical sigh, not a sermon. He doesn’t flatter the reader with possibility; he corners them with probability. If you want to be among the few, he suggests, start by treating your ego as the first problem to fix.