Quote of the day
verified
He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else
Verified
Confirmed by our editorial team.
We traced this quote to a primary published source and confirmed the words are genuinely the author's. You can cite it with confidence.
Source
Benjamin Franklin, *Poor Richard, 1745. An Almanack For the Year of Christ 1745* (under the "Richard Saunders" persona)
Editorial Note
We traced this maxim directly to Franklin's own *Poor Richard's Almanack* for 1745, where it appears in the archival Founders Online transcription as "He that's good for making excuses, is seldom good for any thing else." The modern popular wording ("He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else") differs only in the expansion of "that's" to "that is" and "any thing" to "anything," which is routine modernization rather than a change of authorship. Two of our review passes were unable to locate the line in Franklin's corpus and defaulted to treating it as a common-but-unsupported attribution, but that was an absence of confirmation on their part, not a conflict with the primary record we did find. The book-database matches confirm the line circulates widely under Franklin's name, and while several of those are self-help volumes with no citation, they are consistent with the genuine *Poor Richard* origin rather than pointing to any competing author. We found no credible alternative claimant and no documented earlier use that would displace Franklin. On the strength of the almanac itself as a primary source, we consider this quotation verified.
The Story Behind the Quote
We traced this maxim directly to Franklin's own *Poor Richard's Almanack* for 1745, where it appears in the archival Founders Online transcription as "He that's good for making excuses, is seldom good for any thing else." The modern popular wording ("He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else") differs only in the expansion of "that's" to "that is" and "any thing" to "anything," which is routine modernization rather than a change of authorship. Two of our review passes were unable to locate the line in Franklin's corpus and defaulted to treating it as a common-but-unsupported attribution, but that was an absence of confirmation on their part, not a conflict with the primary record we did find. The book-database matches confirm the line circulates widely under Franklin's name, and while several of those are self-help volumes with no citation, they are consistent with the genuine *Poor Richard* origin rather than pointing to any competing author. We found no credible alternative claimant and no documented earlier use that would displace Franklin. On the strength of the almanac itself as a primary source, we consider this quotation verified.
