Quotes from Harry V. Jaffa

Sovereignty...as understood in the Declaration of Independence was originally, and by nature, the equal and unalienable possession of individual human beings. The original equality of all human beings was an equality of sovereignty; no man had more right to rule another than the other had to rule him.

United States is the first nation in the world to declare its independence, not because of any particular qualities or merits of its own, but because of rights which it shared with all men everywhere. In so doing, it declared the ground of government of the people, by the people, for the people in a sense absolutely unprecedented. In so doing, it laid an equally unprecedented claim to the character of the best regime of Western civilization.

mobocratic spirit, which all must admit, is now abroad in the land.

Ancient man obeyed the laws because they were of divine, not human origin. If a city was defeated in war, that meant its gods were defeated by stronger gods, and men might, without any sense of disloyalty, transfer their allegiance to the gods of their masters. Here the Jews were different in that by holding that their God alone was God, they would not admit that their God could be defeated—nor that they could have any just reason to be faithless to him.