Benjamin Franklin Quotes About Prejudice

• Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Children, Passion, Patriotic

• History affords us many instances of the ruin of states,
  by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and
  genius of their people. The ordaining of laws in favor of one
  part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. ... These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed; whence a total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections, by which the whole state is weakened.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Law, People, Political

• The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Rights, Law, Favors

  Benjamin Franklin, Jared Sparks (1837). “The Works of Benjamin Franklin: Containing Several Political and Historical Tracts Not Included in Any Former Edition, and Many Letters, Official and Private Not Hitherto Published”, p.457

• When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests and their selfish views.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Wisdom, Selfish, Passion

  On the Constitution (1787)

• To get the bad customs of a country changed and new ones, though better, introduced, it is necessary first to remove the prejudices of the people, enlighten their ignorance, and convince them that their interests will be promoted by the proposed changes; and this is not the work of a day.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Country, Ignorance, People

  Benjamin Franklin, William Temple Franklin (1817). “Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin ...”, p.366

• It is wonderful how preposterously the affairs of the world are managed. We assemble parliaments and councils to have the benefit of collected wisdom, but we necessarily have, at the same time, the inconvenience of their collected passions, prejudices and private interests: for regulating commerce an assembly of great men is the greatest fool on earth

  Benjamin Franklin

  Wisdom, Passion, Men

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