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Book: A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America
Quotes of Book: A Great Improvisation:
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  1. Stacy Schiff _ A Great Improvisation:

    Franklin informed his caller that the colonies understood precisely what they were doing, "for we know that separated both countries must become weak; but there is this difference, Great Britain will always remain weak; America after a time, will grow strong.
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  2. Stacy Schiff _ A Great Improvisation:

    Believe me there's no spiteful stupidity, no horror, no absurd story that one can't get the idle-minded folk of a great city to swallow if one goes the right way about it-
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  3. Stacy Schiff _ A Great Improvisation:

    The motto over Chaumont's door read, "Se sta bene non se muove," which a later American tenant translated, overly literally, as "If you stand well, stand still.
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  4. Stacy Schiff _ A Great Improvisation:

    Beaumarchais sighed, consumed by his own labors, "politics only rewards success. Best efforts earn only a bitter smile.
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  5. Stacy Schiff _ A Great Improvisation:

    The Franklin known to the French, the Franklin who had briefly visited Paris in 1767 and 1769 was-in Voltaire's description-the discoverer of electricity, a man of genius, a first name in science, a successor to Newton and Galileo.
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  6. Stacy Schiff _ A Great Improvisation:

    He is drunk at least 22 hours of every 24 and never without one or two whores in company."}
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  7. Stacy Schiff _ A Great Improvisation:

    Franklin was perfectly philosophical on the subject: "For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.
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  8. Stacy Schiff _ A Great Improvisation:

    John Jay would offer the best analysis later, to George Washington: "There is as much intrigue in this state house as in the Vatican, but as little secrecy as in a boarding school.
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  9. Stacy Schiff _ A Great Improvisation:

    a man who spoke no English, who would argue that whole conversations could be sustained in that language with the use of a single word {Goddamn},
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  10. Stacy Schiff _ A Great Improvisation:

    The First Mistake in Public Business Is the Going into It
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  11. Stacy Schiff _ A Great Improvisation:

    If something foreign arrives at Paris, they either think they invented it, or that it has always been there. -Horace Walpole
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  12. Stacy Schiff _ A Great Improvisation:

    In John Adams's worst nightmare, the story of the American Revolution assumed a different formulation: "The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod-and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislatures, and war.
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