The Greatest Sentence Ever Written The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
Избранные цитаты из книги «The Greatest Sentence Ever Written» — Walter Isaacson. Selected quotes from Walter Isaacson's book "The Greatest Sentence Ever Written".
That phrase, We the people, is as profound as it is simple. Our governance is based not on the divine right of kings or the power imposed by emperors and conquerors. It is based on a compact, a social contract, that we the people have entered into.
Jefferson was invoking this collective will, not just the will of the sixty men gathered in Philadelphia, when he began his sentence, “We hold these truths…”
Hume developed a theory, later known as “Hume’s fork,” that there are two types of truths. One type is “synthetic” truths, which are statements whose truth is contingent on empirical evidence and observations.
“David Hume, agreeable to the precepts of the gospel, has received the stranger and I now live with him,” Franklin reported to a friend. They spent their evenings together discussing ideas of natural rights, social contracts, and the revolutionary stirrings rising in the American colonies. Hume developed a theory, later known as “Hume’s fork,” that there are two types of truths. One type is “synthetic” truths, which are statements whose truth is contingent on empirical evidence and observations.
When the drafters declared that “all men are created equal,” they made it clear that they intended this assertion to be a “self-evident” truth, based on reason, not a truth based on observation. People differ widely in their talents and abilities. But the drafters’ point was that all men were autonomous individuals in the state of nature and came together to create the social contract. As a result, they all were equal in terms of the political and social rights that arose from that contract.
Nevertheless, exhibiting the moral contradiction at the core of America’s founding, Jefferson himself enslaved more than six hundred men, women, and children.
His wife, Abigail, was more outspoken, saying that the Southern slaveholding delegates’ “pretensions to liberty are a mockery” when they hold “hundreds in chains.” She even addressed Jefferson directly. “The practice of slavery is a reproach to any people who boast of liberty and equality,” she wrote to him in 1804. “How can those who advocate the rights of man hold their fellow creatures in chains? It is a contradiction that must wound the conscience of every honest man.”
Jefferson’s passages in his draft of the Declaration denouncing the slave trade as “a cruel war against human nature” were edited out by the delegates before it was approved. Of the fifty-six signers, forty-one owned slaves. All thirteen of the colonies permitted slavery. Shortly after the Declaration was signed, the English abolitionist Thomas Day wrote, “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”
Jefferson built on his assertion that men are “created equal” by arguing, in his first draft, “that from that equal creation they derive rights.” Once again, the committee tweaked his language. “They are endowed by their Creator” with rights, the final version declares. The phrase was more felicitous and memorable but did not mean exactly the same thing. It asserted that a creator had endowed them their rights, rather than that those rights were derived from their equal creation in the state of nature.
It is your right—and your opportunity—to seek fulfillment, meaning, and well-being however you personally see fit.
These truths became the creed that bound a diverse group of pilgrims and immigrants into one nation. For a people with many different beliefs and backgrounds, it defined our common ground and aspirations.
Both freedom and economic growth require that we allow individuals to reap the benefits that come from their labor. Our system does, and should, give ample rewards to builders and entrepreneurs and those who work hard, take risks, and even just have good luck. But in doing so, we should keep in mind the moral and practical value of the commons.
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.
The commons serves another purpose. It enables opportunity. That is the moral purpose of the commons. It forms the foundation for creating a land of opportunity and what became known as “the American Dream.”
We go to our different culs-de-sac online, dive down different rabbit holes on the internet, listen to different ends of the talk radio dial, and let algorithms turn our social media feeds into echo chambers. The technology that promised to connect us found a better business model in dividing us.
Eighty percent of kids born in 1950 would go on to earn more, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than their parents had. But for kids born in the 1980s, there was less than a fifty percent chance of achieving the same financial success as their parents. Less than fifty percent. No wonder there was resentment and populist backlash.
Franklin’s wisdom should lead us to ask a basic question: What is the purpose of an economy? To increase wealth? Yes, that’s good. Growth? Yes, also good. But the purpose of an economy is also something deeper. Its purpose is also to create a good society. A good, stable society where individuals can be free and flourish and live together in harmony.
And that’s what we must continue to fight for today so that we can preserve, for ourselves and our posterity, the rights and aspirations that we all share, including to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his… This labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.
but when a long train of abuses & usurpations, begun at a distinguished period, & pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to subject them to arbitrary power, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government & to provide new guards for their future security.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.