We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Declaration of Independence Quotes
All honor to Jefferson – to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document (Declaration of Independence), an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that […]
I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence… I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere separation of the colonies from the motherland, but that sentiment […]
The Declaration of Independence was formed by the representatives of American liberty from thirteen states… Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines which conflict with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence, if you have listened to suggestion which would take from its grandeur, and mutilate the symmetry of its proportions… let […]
Is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race?
“We hold these Truths to be self-evident… ” which is a gracious, Jeffersonian, way of saying, “Any idiot ought to be able to understand this.”
If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worth while… The beauty and cogency of the preamble, reaching back to remotest antiquity and forward so an indefinite future, have lifted the hearts of millions of men and will continue to do… These words are more revolutionary than […]
The sun of Great Britain will set whenever she acknowledges the independence of America… the independence of America would end in the ruin of England.
What is revolutionary about the Declaration of Independence, then, is not that a particular group of Americans declared their independence under particular circumstances but that they did so by appealing to – and promising to base their particular government on – a universal standard of justice.
It is often forgotten that the document which we know as the Declaration of Independence is not the official act by which the Continental Congress voted in favor of separation from Great Britain. June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee, on behalf of the Virginia delegation, submitted to the Continental Congress three resolutions, of which the […]
