"Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English,..." - Quote by Benjamin Franklin

“The absent are never without fault. Nor the present without excuse.”

“Rather go to bed with out dinner than to rise in debt.”

“It is therefore wish'd that all commerce were as free between all the nations of the world as it is between the several counties of England.”

“Each wave of immigrants that have come in have been able to assimilate, integrate and then rise up and become part of this great American Dream.”

“The importation of foreigners into a country that has as many inhabitants as the present employments and provisions for subsistence will bear, will be in the end no increase of people, unless the new comers have more industry and frugality than the natives, and then they will provide more subsistence, and increase in the country; but they will gradually eat the natives out. Nor is it necessary to bring in foreigners to fill up any occasional vacancy in a country for such vacancy will soon be filled by natural generation.”

“We've now got a group of young people in this country who for all practical purposes are American. They grew up here. They've gone to school here. They don't know anything other than being American kids. But their parents may have brought them here without all the proper paperwork - might have brought them here when they were three, might have brought them here when they were five. And so, lo and behold, by the time they finish school, and they're ready to go to college, they find out they can't go to college and, in fact, their status as Americans are threatened.”

“Morale in an organization does not mean that "people get along together"; the test is performance not conformance.”

“Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.”

“Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.”