Today is my country’s birthday. I celebrate humbly, knowing I have no merit in having been born in such an astonishingly free and prosperous nation, for which I have never shed a drop of blood.
But the Declaration isn’t “ours.” It is universal. It’s opening consists of some of the most important sentences ever written.
Powerful truths eloquently expressed shape events long after they are uttered. That is certainly true about the Declaration. It is both a robust expression of human exceptionalism and the natural right to freedom. As such, it is no longer simply the icon of the American founding, but a universal statement of human idealism and truth. So everyone, wherever you are, Happy Independence Day!
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
