Franklin—When Power Purports to Craft Right

Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Discovers Electricity (1816)

Power does not infer Right; and as the Right is nothing and the Power (by our Increase), continually diminishing the one will soon be as insignificant as the other.

–Benjamin Franklin, letter to Samuel Mather, July 7, 1773 in: The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, vol. vi, p. 87 (A.H. Smyth ed. 1906).