Top 120 Franklin Quotes

Aretha Franklin was as important to the civil-rights movement as Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Artists can choose to take on the tremendous amount of responsibility we have, or choose to ignore it.

Aretha Franklin does not like me.

When Aretha Franklin came on the radio when I was in college, we would stop the car, throw open the doors, jump out, and dance.

Before the Colts arrived in 1947, the best athlete in town was a woman duckpin bowler named Toots Barger. Football? The biggest games in Baltimore had been when Johns Hopkins took on Susquehanna or Franklin & Marshall at homecoming.

Benjamin Franklin said there were only two things certain in life: death and taxes. But I’d like to add a third certainty: trash. And while some in this room might want to discuss reducing taxes, I want to talk about reducing trash.

As a kid, I was listening to Aretha Franklin, Etta James and hip-hop as well as music my parents were listening to, like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.

In France, where Franklin had lived from 1776 to 1785, he had won an extraordinary place in the public mind. The French had lionized him to the point of absurdity – or so at least his colleagues in the American mission thought.

On long car rides, we would always listen to the ‘Blues Brothers’ soundtrack and try to emulate everything that Aretha Franklin was doing. There was soul and grit in it that I think a kid from the suburbs really needed.

Recovery measures work better when they raise confidence – as Franklin D. Roosevelt understood. His fireside chats, and his inaugural address proclaiming he would fight the Great Depression with the same resolve he would muster against a foreign foe, were aimed at reassuring Americans.

Being around people like Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick and Roberta Flack, all these greats, I was taught to listen and observe.

As a child, I walked with my friends to Rosa Parks Elementary and then to Ben Franklin Middle School. I rode Muni to Galileo High School. And thanks to amazing teachers who believed in me and supported me along the way, I was able to matriculate to another public school: the University of California at Davis.

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.

I was determined to create my own identity. My first hits, in fact, were straight-up rhythm and blues. My voice was compared to Aretha Franklin’s – though, for my money, no one compares to Aretha.

The United States has tried for years to live down President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s order during World War II to move Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to inland detention camps on grounds that they might be disloyal.

Every time I see my brother, I just praise God for God’s grace in his life. Because if God can change Franklin from a prodigal into a man of God, he can do it for anybody.

My liberal friends love to dismiss Reagan. You know, they’ll say something like, ‘Oh, didn’t he, like, only read one-page memos when he was in the White House?’ Well, that’s just good managerial practice. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt made people write one-page memos.

I used to be a pop singer; well, not used to be. I am an R&B singer. My emphasis was on Stevie Wonder and Chaka Khan and Aretha Franklin.

In the end, the sign of Aretha Franklin’s artistry is that she always leaves her mark – first, on the music, then on us.

The issues are by some geometric number – 100 or 200 or 500 – times more complicated today than we appreciated them to be when Franklin Roosevelt was around.

I grew up with music in the house. I was told I could sing as soon as I started talking. Everybody in my family sang, always lots of records, blues and jazz and soul, R&B, you know, like Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Coltrane, that kind of thing.

I have a plant called Roger Franklin and he is really special. I’m not trying to sound weird, but he has a lot of personality and I talk to him every day. It’s the first plant I’ve kept alive for longer than a week and I’m very proud of that. I try every day to make sure that he’s happy.

I can’t sing like Aretha Franklin as much as I wish I could. And I don’t sing like Etta James and the Judds as much as I wish I could.

Since the emergence of the Republican Party, only two Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, have been followed by Democrats, and both FDR and JFK died in office, so their successors ran as incumbents.

I met senators, diplomats and the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It is essential for politicians to make a connection with us, as Franklin Roosevelt did, as Teddy Roosevelt did, as John F. Kennedy did, as Ronald Reagan did.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn’t take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans’ responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.

I cannot express how much music got me through lockdown. I re-discovered Roberta Flack, Smokey Robinson, and Aretha Franklin.

Aretha Franklin is and will always be a national treasure.

I was a sailor. I was torpedoed, spent two weeks in a lifeboat. I was on the Murmansk run; I worked a 20 mm. machine gun, helped bring down a Stuka, all that kind of stuff. I’ve got letters from Franklin Roosevelt for things I did then. But those kind of credentials didn’t work for you in the Cold War.

Baseball may be our national pastime, but the age-old tradition of taking a swing at Congress is a sport with even deeper historical roots in the American experience. Since the founding of our country, citizens from Ben Franklin to David Letterman have made fun of their elected officials.

Our only president who has died as U.S. commander in chief in war is Franklin Delano Roosevelt – who died of a cerebral hemorrhage or massive stroke on April 12, 1945, only three weeks before the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces he had laid down as implacable Allied policy two years before.

President Obama did something that no Democrat’s done since Franklin Roosevelt: that is, get a majority vote in Ohio twice. So I don’t really buy that his policy is that unpopular.

During the 1937 congressional election campaign, Johnson’s group probably paid $5,000 to Elliott Roosevelt, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s sons, for a telegram in which Elliott suggested that the Roosevelt family favored Lyndon Johnson.

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.

Everybody knows now that Marie Lightfoot, the true crime writer, is dating Franklin DeWeese, the state attorney of Howard County, Florida. They know I’m a white woman; they know he’s a black man. That’s not news anymore.

Since Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application.

Benjamin Franklin maintained that every star is a sun, and every sun nourishes a ‘chorus of worlds’ just like ours.

I was told all my life to sing like Aretha Franklin, or Adele, cover myself with black clothing and show more soul, sing bigger.

I was fortunate enough to meet Aretha Franklin but I was so overwhelmed that I just burst out crying.

My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong.

I want the people of Franklin County to know how much I care about them.

I’ve always loved music. I grew up with older brothers and sisters who were into music, played The Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin.

If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson – what we’re doing now in this country is making them roll over in their graves.

Growing up in Cleveland, I learned about singing from my mother, who had once sung professionally and who admired Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin.

Facts are facts: No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression inherited a worse economy, bigger job losses or deeper problems from his predecessor. But President Obama is moving America forward, not back.

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.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to find a way to help the American people. In 1933, he created a relief program known as the New Deal. Two years later, he expanded the New Deal by adding the Works Progress Administration, which was renamed the Work Projects Administration in 1939.

From the end of Reconstruction through the civil rights revolution, the South was an almost uniformly Democratic region. In 1936, for example, Franklin Roosevelt won more than 98 percent of the vote in South Carolina.