The myth that young people should leave the nest at 18, never to return, started with iconic American Benjamin Franklin.
How I longed to see these things; how I longed to see the Liberty Bell and walk on the streets where Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin had walked.
Historically, when Americans don't know what to do next, they go to Paris. Benjamin Franklin is like: 'What am I going to do now? I'll go to Paris!'
Benjamin Franklin may have discovered electricity, but it was the man who invented the meter who made the money.
One day, I saw a statue of Benjamin Franklin, and I said to myself, 'I can do that kind of work, too.'
I'm often asked, 'Why didn't Benjamin Franklin ever become president?' My short, easy answer is: He died.
For years, I've had a hankering for the portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Duplessis. Franklin is credited with so many inventions: the postal system, lightning rods, the constitution. He was a rock star before there was such a thing.
Some of the most productive people in history have been self-confessed 'muck-middens,' as my husband would say: Agatha Christie, Benjamin Franklin and even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, to name a few.
Benjamin Franklin maintained that every star is a sun, and every sun nourishes a 'chorus of worlds' just like ours.
I tell the story of eight forgotten founders, people like Canassatego, an Iroquois Indian Chief, who taught Benjamin Franklin about federalism, about the idea that you can form a confederacy in which the central power has only limited powers and local control is retained.
