“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.”
Declaration of Independence Quotes
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 […]
If the Declaration has not been forgotten, if it has been much criticized, much denounced and much applauded, if it has never lacked “friends” or “enemies,” no doubt one essential reason is that it was an event, or at least the chief symbol of an event of surpassing historical importance, as well as a literary […]
The Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny… The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.
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.
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 […]
