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  • 2022-05-19 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Ben Franklin Write About Freedom of Thought and Speech? (en)
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  • On May 16, 2022, the Remarkable Books Facebook page published a quote-meme attributed to Benjamin Franklin with the words, Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech. In the past, our investigations of these kinds of history quotes often ended with a conclusion that they had been misattributed to the wrong person. However, in this case, the quote truly did come from Franklin. Franklin wrote the quote about freedom of thought and freedom of speech around July 1722. At the time, he was 16 years old. The words in the meme appeared in one of a series of letters published under the fake name of Silence Dogood. They were all printed in The New-England Courant, a newspaper that was founded by Franklin's older brother, James. The Museum of Hoaxes website reported that some men who read letters from Dogood offered to marry her. Of course, they had no idea she wasn't real, nor did they know it was Franklin doing all of the writing: In sum, while the quote about freedom of thought and freedom of speech was originally credited to a fake name, it truly was originally written by Franklin. (en)
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