Life & Mortality Quote by Benjamin Franklin

"If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing"

Benjamin Franklin, Politician

About this Quote

Franklin’s line lands like a colonial-era mic drop: immortality is earned, not granted, and the currency is public usefulness. It’s both blunt career advice and a quiet rebuke to inherited status. In an 18th-century world still thick with aristocratic afterglow, he shrinks legacy down to two democratic options: produce ideas people actually want to keep, or live a life so consequential that someone else has to narrate it. No genealogy required.

The construction is doing more work than it seems. Franklin sets up a conditional bargain - “If you would not…” - that treats remembrance as a practical problem, not a spiritual mystery. Then he offers a clean either/or that collapses art and action into the same moral category: value. Writing “worth reading” isn’t about elegance; it’s about utility, persuasion, and staying power. Doing “things worth writing” frames politics and civic life as raw material for history, but with a sting: history doesn’t automatically record you just because you held office. You have to deserve the ink.

Subtext: Franklin is pitching his signature brand of Enlightenment self-fashioning. Reputation becomes a project, not a fate, and death doesn’t sanctify anyone. The quote also carries a proto-media savvy: it recognizes that what survives is what gets transmitted - through texts or through the stories others tell. Legacy, in Franklin’s view, is a form of publication.

Quote Details

Topic	Legacy & Remembrance
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About the Author

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 - April 17, 1790) was a Politician from USA.

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