Quotes About Declaration of Independence

You go back and you read your Constitution. You read your Declaration of Independence. And you will see that the only people who could decide these freedoms were white males who owned property, and all the rest of us were excluded.

The search for happiness has long been a dominant feature of American life. It's a byproduct of prosperity, not to mention the most famous line in the Declaration of Independence.

I should like to know if, taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, you begin making exceptions to it, where will you stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?

Abraham Lincoln and others recoiled from the idea of government as a prop for the rich. In organizing the Republican Party, they highlighted the equality of opportunity promised in the Declaration of Independence and warned that a healthy economy depended on widespread prosperity.

including Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and popularizers such as Archibald Alison, elaborating on sensibility and sympathy as the most important aspects of human psychology. These products of what Henry May calls the Didactic Enlightenment were enormously influential in America. They were heavily represented in the curricula of American colleges, and their ideas influenced everything from the Declaration of Independence to the practice and theory of all of the fine arts.

There is a place for government in the affairs of men, and our Declaration of Independence tells us precisely what that place is. The role of government is to protect individuals in their God-given individual rights. Freedom is the natural birthright of man, but all that government can do in behalf of freedom is to let the individual alone, and it should secure him in his rights by making others let him alone.

In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?

The existence of slavery cast the shadow of hypocrisy over the otherwise noble proclamation of the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in our Declaration of Independence.

Our Declaration of Independence was the start of a conversation about how to achieve life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for every citizen. Our Constitution was always intended to grow and adapt as we formed a more perfect union, established justice, and ensured peace, security, and the blessings of liberty.

The Declaration of Independence I always considered as a theatrical show. Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect of that... and all the glory of it.

declared their independence.

by a single proclamation all the Greeks inhabiting both Asia and Europe became free

a man without birth, without courage, without conduct. For my part, I declare, sir, it shall never be said that I made such a man my master.

If the Declaration of Independence states our creed, there can be no right to abortion, since it means denying the most fundamental right of all to the unborn child, the right to life.

The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.

In fact, however, Nietzsche's very first book, The Birth, constitutes a declaration of independence from Schopenhauer: while Nietzsche admires him for honestly facing up to the terrors of existence, Nietzsche himself celebrates Greek tragedy as a superior alternative to Schopenhauer's "Buddhistic negation of the will." From tragedy Nietzsche learns that one can affirm life as sublime, beautiful, and joyous in spite of all suffering and cruelty.

Declaration of Independence: that all of our rights and liberties come to us from our Creator.

Admirers of Jefferson might best be advised to skip everything he ever wrote about women and restrict their attention to the Declaration of Independence.)

Well, you know, Thomas Jefferson, who was the author of the Declaration of Independence said he wouldn't have any atheists in his cabinet because atheists wouldn't swear an oath to God. That was Jefferson and we have never had any Muslims in the cabinet.

Who would think it possible to redirect historical scholarship by explaining what Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence?

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, declaring that all men were created equal, he owned slaves. Women couldn't vote. But, throughout history, our abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights leaders called on our nation, in reality, to live up to the nation's professed ideals in that Declaration.

Nothing manifests more persuasively the American contradiction than that the author of the Declaration of Independence, a slave owner, wrote an antislavery clause into the document - as if to compel himself to be better than he was - which then had to be edited out so the Southern states, including Thomas Jefferson's own, would sign it.

Its constitution the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration of Independence is so lucid were afraid of it today. It scares the hell out of every modern bureaucrat, because it tells them there comes a time when we must stop taking orders.