Benjamin Franklin — "He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else."
He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.
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About Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Polymath Founding Father, diplomat, and Poor Richard's Almanack author who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Closely associated with John Adams (fellow Founder, Massachusetts statesman) and Thomas Jefferson (fellow Declaration drafter). For an intellectual contrast, see Thomas Hutchinson, last royal governor of colonial Massachusetts — Franklin leaked Hutchinson's loyalist correspondence to Boston in 1772 to inflame revolutionary sentiment — Hutchinson represented the colonial-aristocrat crown-loyalty that Franklin's revolution was organized to dismantle.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
People who habitually justify failure or inaction rarely accomplish anything meaningful. Excuses become a substitute for effort — a mental escape hatch that blocks genuine work. Someone skilled at rationalization spends their energy explaining why things cannot be done rather than doing them. The saying ties character directly to productivity: a person's usefulness can be judged by whether they reach first for a solution or a justification when obstacles appear.
Relevance to Benjamin Franklin
Franklin rose from a Boston candlemaker's ninth son to printer, scientist, inventor, and diplomat through relentless self-discipline. He retired his printing business at 42, then pursued electricity, civic projects, and statecraft with equal drive. His Poor Richard's Almanack is packed with accountability maxims, and he kept a private journal tracking thirteen personal virtues. A man who built everything through action, Franklin was constitutionally impatient with the self-deception he skewered here.
The era
Colonial America offered no institutional safety nets — a tradesman or farmer who made excuses simply went hungry or went broke. The Protestant work ethic, inherited from Puritan New England, framed idleness and self-justification as moral failures, not personality quirks. Simultaneously, Enlightenment thinking emphasized rational agency: individuals were believed to control outcomes through effort and reason. Excuses were therefore both a practical liability and a philosophical embarrassment in Franklin's world.
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