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
Source	Help us find the source
Cite

More Quotes by Benjamin Add to List

About the Author

Benjamin Franklin

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

162 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

"Just to be remembered is good enough for me. Lots of people are forgotten"

Sadie Frost, Actress

"My work has typically been about finding a means to express memory and commemoration for loss and grief"

John Regan, Musician

"When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing"

Tennessee Williams, Dramatist

Tennessee Williams

"I will try to write books until I drop dead"

Cornelia Funke, Author

"When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask"

C. S. Forester, Novelist

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important"

Steve Jobs, Businessman

Steve Jobs

"I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing"

Anne Tyler, Novelist

"Perhaps it's more merciful to forget the dead instead of remembering them"

Jose Bergaman, Writer

"One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead"

Joseph Barbera, Cartoonist

"By the end of the week, if I'm still alive, I get to write whatever I want about it all"

Michael Musto, Writer

"Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of [my husband] and me. Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me"

Marge Piercy, Writer

Marge Piercy

"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead"

Samuel Goldwyn, Producer

Samuel Goldwyn

"It is to be regretted that few persons who have arrived at any degree of eminence or fame, have written Memorials of themselves, at least such as have embraced their private as well as their public life"

Adam Clarke, Theologian

"If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered"

Edgar Allan Poe, Poet

Edgar Allan Poe

"Make a living will. Talk about it. Death is going to happen to everybody. Write it down. Even if you write it on a piece of paper at home and have your family witness it, you need to write it down"

Michael Schiavo, Celebrity

"Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them"

George Eliot, Author

George Eliot

"I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again"

Elie Wiesel, Novelist

Elie Wiesel

"There is nothing on earth so easy as to forget, if a person chooses to set about it. I'm sure I have as much forgot your poor, dear uncle, as if he had never existed; and I thought it my duty to do so"

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Playwright

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

"In this bright future you can't forget your past"

Bob Marley, Musician

Bob Marley

"I write journals and would recommend journal writing to anyone who wishes to pursue a writing career. You learn a lot. You also remember a lot... and memory is important"

Judy Collins, Musician