re: #70 Skip Intro

Is this a fake quote?

Hell, who cares?

It seems to be a fake quote, as it does not appear before the twenty-first century (except once), and never attributes a particular work by Franklin when citing it.

Much more at the link, but this stands out:

In the 520 Google Books search matches I looked at for the phrase “born ignorant,” I found multiple references to (and some paraphrases of) relevant quotations from St. Augustine, Giordano Bruno, John Knox, Samuel von Pufendorf, Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, John Locke, Thomas Halyburton, Isaac Watts, Claude Helvétius, Mary Wollstonecraft, Laurence Stern, Henry Ward Beecher, Thomas Hood, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Emmanuel Swedenborg, and Bertrand Russell—and all of them ultimately tied the quoted language to a particular work containing the phrase. The Franklin quote was the lone exception: No one offers any clear source in his work for it. I have no doubt that the attribution of this wording to Franklin is spurious.

What Franklin probably did say

Having rejected the attribution of the quotation cited by the OP to Franklin, I note that one source, Poor Richard’s Almanac (1914), which consists of “Selections from the apothegms and proverbs” of Franklin, offers this otherwise unsourced saying:

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

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