The Greatest Sentence Ever Written Quotes

“Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

“Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

“Property is a cornerstone of Locke’s theory of justice. By owning the fruits of their labor, people preserve their liberty and individual rights.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

“As we reach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, we are embroiled in increasingly polarized debates over policies ranging from healthcare and housing to immigration and the role of religion in our society. One way to restore stability to our politics is to look at issues through the two ideals that are at the heart of the Declaration’s key sentence: common ground and the pursuit of the American Dream.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

“Franklin and Jefferson understood balance. They were part of an Enlightenment era that embraced the scientific method of testing and revising beliefs based on evidence. Both of them studied Isaac Newton, whose mechanics explained how contending forces could be brought into equilibrium. Their goal on contentious issues was not to triumph but to find the right balance, an art that has been lost today. Compromisers may not make great heroes, Franklin liked to say, but they do make great democracies.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

“We hold these truths to be self-evident”
― Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

“Franklin correctly saw the danger of creating a meritocratic aristocracy. His proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania were designed not to filter a new elite but to provide opportunities and enrichment for all young people to succeed as best they could, whatever their level of talent. He aimed at what he called "true merit," which he defined as "an inclination joined with an ability to serve mankind, one's country, friends, and family, which... should indeed be the great aim and end of all learning.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

“If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency in one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

“Jefferson’s original formulation reflected his religious outlook, known as Deism. Like Franklin and the many other Deists among the Founders, he believed in a supreme being or creator but rejected the idea of a personalized God who acts through supernatural interventions, divine revelations, and miracles, and he denied the divinity of Jesus. Deists derive their understanding of God from reason and observation of the natural world, making them adherents of “the laws of nature and of nature’s god,” as Jefferson put it, echoing Voltaire, in the first sentence of the Declaration. Deists believe that God set the universe in motion with wondrous laws but did not intervene in human affairs after that. Deism was the creed of most thinkers of the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century Age of Reason that emphasized rationality, science, individualism, and natural rights. Its leaders included Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, and, in America, Franklin and Jefferson. Jefferson’s Deism led him to create what became known as the Jefferson Bible; he used a razor and glue to create a version that focused solely on Jesus’s moral teachings and cut out all mentions of Jesus’s miracles, resurrection, and divinity. In a 1787 letter to his nephew Peter Carr, Jefferson advised, “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

“civil discussions, personal conversations, algorithms, and chatbots that”
― Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained, & to assume among the powers of the earth the equal & independant station to which the laws of nature & 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 change.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written