Did Benjamin Franklin say "We need a revolution every 200 years"?

Q: Did Benjamin Franklin say "We need a revolution every 200 years"?

No. There is no Franklin source. His papers are digitised and full-text searchable at Founders Online, and neither the sentence nor the phrase 'every two hundred years' appears anywhere in them — or, for that matter, anywhere in the papers of the other six founders on the site. The popular long form ('…because all governments become stale and corrupt after 200 years') circulates only on quotation sites, none of which cite a document the search, returning nothing.

Who really said it

We need a revolution every 200 years

Nobody we can name — not Franklin Unknown Origin undocumented · credited to Franklin (1706–1790) without a source

Disputed Rights unconfirmed

There is no Franklin source. His papers are digitised and full-text searchable at Founders Online, and neither the sentence nor the phrase ‘every two hundred years’ appears anywhere in them — or, for that matter, anywhere in the papers of the other six founders on the site. The popular long form (‘…because all governments become stale and corrupt after 200 years’) circulates only on quotation sites, none of which cite a document the search, returning nothing ↗.

Last verified 21 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“We need a revolution every 200 years” Widely credited to Benjamin Franklin, but unsourced — it appears nowhere in his papers.

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Benjamin Franklin. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

Evoking the world of Benjamin Franklin — printer, scientist & Founding Father. Theme: "We need a revolution every 200 years". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

The source

Origin: Undocumented — no source located
Franklin source: None — absent from his collected papers
Earliest located: Not established; circulates on quotation sites
Nearest genuine line: Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, 13 November 1787

God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion. ... The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure. Jefferson, 13 November 1787 — the adjacent line

Not the quote on this page. This is Jefferson, writing to William Stephens Smith about Shays’ Rebellion — a different man, a different decade, and an interval of twenty years rather than two hundred. It is the closest genuine thing in the founders’ papers, which is probably how Franklin ended up wearing it.

Founders Online — phrase search returning no results

How we traced it

Franklin’s writings are one of the best-indexed bodies of text in American history. Founders Online carries the Yale edition of his papers in full, searchable to the word — which means absence really is evidence. A phrase search for ‘every two hundred years’ across all seven founders’ papers returns zero results, and ‘revolution every’ returns eleven hits, none of them Franklin’s and none of them this run the search ↗.
The quotation-site versions have no citation of any kind — no letter, no pamphlet, no reported remark. Even some aggregators list the long form under ‘Unknown’ rather than Franklin. A Quora asker had already flagged it as apocryphal before we looked the question ↗.
The idea it echoes is real, but it belongs to Thomas Jefferson, and his number was twenty. Writing to William Stephens Smith from Paris on 13 November 1787 about Shays’ Rebellion, he said ‘God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion’ — and, a few lines later, produced the tree-of-liberty sentence Jefferson’s letter ↗.

Rights are indeterminate, because the origin is unknown — we cannot date a text we cannot source, so we make no public-domain claim for it. In practice a single unattributed sentence of unknown authorship carries little risk, but the honest label is ‘unsourced.’ The genuinely old texts quoted alongside it here — Jefferson’s 1787 letter, Franklin’s 1755 reply — are public domain. This is not legal advice.

Fact-check

The attribution problem

This is a clean case: a searchable author, a phrase that is not there, and a real quotation nearby that explains the confusion.

Not Benjamin Franklin absent from a searchable corpus

Franklin’s collected papers are online and searchable word by word. Neither ‘every two hundred years’ nor any sentence of this shape appears. With a corpus this well indexed, silence is close to proof the null result ↗.

Also unsourced no citation anywhere

The version quotation sites carry — ‘…because all governments become stale and corrupt after 200 years’ — is offered with no letter, date or publication behind it. Some aggregators file it under ‘Unknown,’ which is the honest answer.

Thomas Jefferson — different quote, different number conflation

Jefferson wrote in 1787 that he hoped America would never go twenty years without a rebellion, and that the tree of liberty needs refreshing with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Twenty, not two hundred; Jefferson, not Franklin; and about a specific tax revolt in Massachusetts the letter ↗.

Constitutions for the living adjacent, still not this

Jefferson also argued that each generation — which he reckoned at about nineteen years — should be free to remake its own laws and constitution. That is where the ‘refresh the system periodically’ instinct genuinely comes from, and it is again not a two-century clock and not Franklin.

No documented author. Franklin’s papers do not contain it; the nearest genuine sentiment is Jefferson’s in 1787, and his interval was twenty years Jefferson, 1787 ↗.

Context

Why it resonates

Two hundred years is a suspiciously convenient number for an American audience: it puts the next scheduled revolution somewhere in living memory of the reader, which is precisely what makes the line quotable in an argument.

It also flatters Franklin’s reputation as the founder who saw the machinery ageing — the man who supposedly answered ‘a republic, if you can keep it.’ Attaching a decay clock to him feels right, which is exactly the reflex this site exists to interrupt.

Jefferson said twenty years, about one rebellion, in a private letter. Somebody moved the decimal point and changed the name.

What Jefferson actually said, and when

13 November 1787, Paris: writing to William Stephens Smith about Shays’ Rebellion, Jefferson calculates that thirteen states in eleven years have produced one rebellion — ‘one rebellion in a century and a half for each state.’

In the same paragraph: ‘God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion.’

And then the famous image: the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

That is a private letter about one tax revolt, written by a man in Paris who had not seen it — not a constitutional maintenance schedule.

Franklin, in the same years, was in Philadelphia helping write the constitution Jefferson was grumbling about.

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Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Founders Online — ‘every two hundred years’: no resultsfounders.archives.gov

The negative search across all seven founders’ papers, including Franklin’s in full.

Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, 13 November 1787founders.archives.gov

The genuine adjacent letter: ‘20. years without such a rebellion’ and the tree of liberty.

The apocryphal Franklin ‘revolution every 200 years’ quotequora.com

The question that keeps getting asked, already flagged as apocryphal by the asker.

Popularly credited author

Why it gets pinned on Franklin

Benjamin Franklin

1706–1790 · printer, scientist & Founding Father

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) is the founder people reach for when they want a saying to sound both wise and faintly mischievous — he wrote aphorisms for a living in Poor Richard’s Almanack, so almost anything epigrammatic can be made to fit him. He also supplies the famous exit line about a republic ‘if you can keep it,’ which primes people to expect warnings about political decay from him. What he did not do was set a maintenance schedule for revolutions.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Attributed to Benjamin Franklin without citation. Absent from The Papers of Benjamin Franklin and from Founders Online in full-text search.

MLA (9th ed.)

“We need a revolution every 200 years.” Unsourced; commonly misattributed to Benjamin Franklin.

APA (7th ed.)

We need a revolution every 200 years. (n.d.). Unsourced saying [commonly misattributed to Benjamin Franklin].

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We need a revolution every 200 years’?” Last verified 21 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/we-need-a-revolution-every-200-years