Leadership Quote by Benjamin Franklin

Franklin’s line lands like a shrug with a dagger in it: the real blunder isn’t corruption, incompetence, or bad policy - it’s volunteering in the first place. Coming from a founder who spent his life in committees, salons, and statecraft, the joke is barbed self-portraiture. He’s not claiming government is useless; he’s warning that the job metabolizes people.

The intent is prophylactic. Franklin is speaking to the ambitious citizen who imagines “public business” as honor, impact, maybe even moral cleanliness. He punctures that fantasy by framing entry itself as error. It’s a reversal of civic piety: instead of celebrating service as virtue, he treats it as exposure. The subtext is that politics is a machine that grinds up private happiness and public reputation at the same time. Once you step in, you inherit other people’s expectations, their grievances, their conspiracies, their need for someone to blame.

It works because Franklin’s cynicism is delivered as practical wisdom, not despair. The phrasing is plain, almost bookkeeping: “the first mistake” sounds like a ledger entry, which makes the conclusion feel inevitable. Context matters, too. Eighteenth-century public life was brutal on the body and the name - travel was punishing, institutions were unstable, factions were personal, and fame traveled as gossip. Franklin watched the costs up close: friendships strained, motives misread, compromises caricatured.

The quiet kicker is that he kept going anyway. The line doubles as a warning and a confession: politics is necessary, but no one should enter it thinking it won’t exact a price.