Franklin Book Groups Program

"It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."
Samuel Adams

"When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon."
Thomas Paine

"Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt."
William Shakespeare

"There can be no national greatness which does not rest upon the personal integrity of the people."
Calvin Coolidge

"The individual has rights, but only the citizen has the power to protect rights. And the protection of rights is righteous."
Calvin Coolidge

"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance given to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt."
Cicero

"Father, I knew, put an almost religious importance on education. He himself had had to stop school early to go to work in the watch shop and...had gone on to teach himself history, theology, and literature in five languages..."
Corrie ten Boom

“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth…”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If a people expect to be ignorant and free…they expect what never was and never will be.”
Thomas Jefferson

“Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That’s absolute nonsense. In one year…I read twenty-five books while waiting for people.”
Louis L'Amour

"No matter how much [the student] knows or how fully he has thought, he is relentlessly pushed [in discussion] until his back touches the wall of the great absolutes."
Jacques Barzun

"Always, my reading was to understand."
Louis L'Amour

"...it is the Right of the People to alter [their government]...laying its foundations on such principles..."
Declaration of Independence

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends." Hamlet
William Shakespeare

"...the rational part of the soul will be the agent which puts in order the irrational part, and passion and appetite...will be regulated...there will properly result...sobriety, courage, gentleness, self-control, fortitude, and the like."
Nicomachus

"...in every man, there [are] two beings: one the spiritual, seeking only that kind of happiness for him self which should tend towards the happiness of all; the other, the animal man, seeking only his own happiness..."
Leo Tolstoy

"...responsible leading must be learned and earned...just as virtue, which is the core of responsible leading, is earned: by living in accordance with the instructions of conscience, and by working to emulate the exemplary legacies of those we study and the active examples of those from whom we learn."
Josiah Bunting III

"Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy." Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare

"Truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"...improving one's mind or enlarging one's spirit is...more difficult than solving the problems of subsistence."
Mortimer J. Adler

"I have seen the fruits of adult education. It can be done."
Mortimer Adler

“Robert Hutchins…never deviated from his devotion to [the concept] of a Socratic dialogue on the Great Books as the basis of the general education he believed essential for all citizens of a democratic republic.”
Harry S. Ashmore

"...the serious study of history has been declining for half a century and more [1991]...those who understand the past can prepare prudently for a tolerable future"
Russell Kirk

"Principles are guidelines for human conduct that are proven to have enduring, permanent value."
Stephen R. Covey

“The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.”
C.S. Lewis