The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.

This July 4th, Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Like so much else these days, the anniversary has become politicized, which only distracts from the brilliance of the document itself and the noble experiment it launched, one that has now endured for two and a half centuries. 

So let's set politics aside for a moment and travel back to Philadelphia in July 1776, where Thomas Jefferson drafted a sentence that historian and biographer Walter Isaacson calls The Greatest Sentence Ever Written: 

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. 

A nation built on reason, not birthright 

Isaacson explains that the Declaration's goal was to herald a new kind of nation; one in which rights were grounded in reason, not birthright, religious dogma, or royal decree. The founders treated equality as self-evident: true by definition, because all people were equal participants in a shared social contract. 

Author Jonathan Turley makes a similar point in Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. The Declaration spoke to the rights of all mankind not just the rights of Englishmen, but rights belonging to every person born to liberty. Government's legitimacy, in this view, rested entirely on its protection of those natural, Creator-endowed rights. 

Breaking from two tyrannies 

Thomas Paine put it plainly in Common Sense: the colonies faced two tyrannies, the king and the hereditary House of Lords, both of which granted certain people more rights than others simply by birth. 

What made America different in 1776 — and still does today — is the founders' belief that everyone holds the same unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of parentage or station. That last phrase, the pursuit of happiness, is really about opportunity: everyone's right to seek fulfillment and well-being on their own terms. It's the foundation of the American Dream. 

An unfinished promise 

Living up to the promise that "all men are created equal" has been a constant American struggle. Historian Heather Cox Richardson notes that by 1863, Abraham Lincoln feared the idea was no longer self-evident. At Gettysburg, he reframed it not as a truth requiring no defense, but as a proposition that had to be argued for, tested, and proven. How else could "all men are created equal" survive in a nation half-fighting a war to preserve human bondage? 

Richardson's point is that equality isn't a guarantee handed down by nature. It's a commitment each generation has to choose, and defend, for itself. 

Celebrating the experiment 

This July 4th, let's celebrate the founders' insight that America is a land of opportunity — where everyone owns the fruits of their own labor because everyone holds the same political and social rights, even when the odds aren't in their favor. And let's recognize, as Lincoln did, that today's challenges are real — and that it's up to us to ensure this nation, so conceived and so dedicated, long endures. 

Happy 250th birthday, America.