Declaration Of Independence Famous Quotes

The “pursuit of happiness” is such a key element of the “American (ideological) dream” that one tends to forget the contingent origin of this phrase: “We holds 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.” Where did the somewhat awkward “pursuit of happiness” come from in this famous opening passage of the US Declaration of Independence? The origin of it is John Locke, who claimed that all men had the natural rights of life, liberty, and property— the latter was replaced by “the pursuit of happiness” during negotiations of the drafting of the Declaration, as a way to negate the black slaves’ right to property.

2. We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

As the most famous product of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence, put it, in order to secure the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics and among these are life and pursuit of pleasure' - Translation of most famous quote from American declaration of independence in Sapiens

Famously, in 1852, formerly enslaved maritime worker Frederick Douglass asked, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” He honored the Founders as “great men” but asked: “Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?”[3]

But why should 1299 CE be considered the founding date of the empire? – there were no famous battles, no declarations of independence or storming of a bastille. The simplest explanations are often the most convincing: that year corresponds to the years 699–700 in the Islamic calendar. By rare mathematical coincidence, the centuries turned at the same time in both the Christian and Islamic calendars. What more auspicious year to mark the founding of an empire that spanned Europe and the Middle East?

Yet the idea that all humans are equal is also a myth. In what sense do all humans equal one another? Is there any objective reality, outside the human imagination, in which we are truly equal? Are all humans equal to one another biologically? Let us try to translate the most famous line of the American Declaration of Independence into biological terms: 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.

With Betsy already famous for feelings, Nabby took pride in her independent spirit and level head. She declared that because love was founded in self-interest she would never be swept off her feet by a cad, and she shocked her friends by leaving a Harvard commencement party early. She shared her father's skepticism about human nature: in her opinion one was more likely to be good because one was happy than happy because one was good. "I believe our happiness is in great measure dependent upon external circumstances," Nabby wrote to Betsy, disagreeing with her cousin's view that we take an active role in our well-being. If success could be attained by effort or merit, why, she reasoned, should she be showered by "ten thousand sources of happiness" while others, who were equally devastating, were starved of the most basic needs?

On September 2, the day the Democratic National Convention in Chicago nominated George McClellan for president, news flashed across the country of the fall of Atlanta to General William Tecumseh Sherman after a long siege. Just as the Democrats met to declare the war a failure and crafted a platform that would lead to a negotiated Confederate independence of some kind, Sherman famously sent a telegram to Washington: “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” Confederates’ rising hopes plummeted, and many war-weary Northerners, represented by the famous New York diarist George Templeton Strong, saw victory now on the immediate horizon: “Glorious news this morning—Atlanta taken at last!!! It is . . . the greatest event of the war.”45 The Democrats’ peace platform put Lincoln’s apparent moderation in a different light; and Douglass had seen a devotion in the president’s heart and mind

What few knew at the beginning, but many of us know now, is that this was a typical response on the part of this intensely individualistic man, who had attended Waseda in the late 1960s, at the height of the student riots in Tokyo, and joined in the violence but strictly as an independent; he refused to join any political group or faction but hurled stones at the police in his own right. Today we know Murakami as the man who went to Jerusalem to accept the Jerusalem Prize from the Israeli government and in his acceptance speech criticized the Israeli state for its military actions against civilians in Gaza, declaring to his hosts, in effect, that if they chose to bring their massive military and political power against the individuals protesting in the Gaza Strip, then, right or wrong, he would stand against them. This was his now famous declaration of the “wall and eggs” metaphor, in which powerful political systems are seen as a great stone wall, and individuals as eggs, hopelessly and rather suicidally hurling themselves against its implacable strength.

Congress decided to put him on a committee to write a declaration explaining why the colonies were seeking independence. It was back in the days when Congress knew how to appoint really good committees: Franklin and Jefferson and John Adams were on it. They knew that leadership required not merely asserting values, but finding a balance when values conflict. We can see that in the deft editing of the famous sentence that opens the second paragraph of the Declaration. “We hold these truths to be sacred . . . ,” Jefferson had written. On the copy of his draft at the Library of Congress we can see the dark printer’s ink and backslashes of Franklin’s pen as he changes it to “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” His point was that our rights would come from rationality and the consent of the governed, not the dictates and dogma of any religion. Jefferson’s draft sentence went on to say that all men have certain inalienable rights. We can see Adams’s hand making an addition: “They are endowed by their Creator” with these inalienable rights. So just in the editing of one half of one sentence we can see how Franklin and his colleagues struck a unifying balance between the grace of divine providence and the role of democratic consent in the founding values of our nation.

For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past. The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information. A darker view of the information-dominated universe was described in the famous story “The Library of Babel,” written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.§ Borges imagined his library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe. Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition: We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

If this is true—if solitude is an important key to creativity—then we might all want to develop a taste for it. We’d want to teach our kids to work independently. We’d want to give employees plenty of privacy and autonomy. Yet increasingly we do just the opposite. We like to believe that we live in a grand age of creative individualism. We look back at the midcentury era in which the Berkeley researchers conducted their creativity studies, and feel superior. Unlike the starched-shirted conformists of the 1950s, we hang posters of Einstein on our walls, his tongue stuck out iconoclastically. We consume indie music and films, and generate our own online content. We “think different” (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer’s famous ad campaign). But the way we organize many of our most important institutions—our schools and our workplaces—tells a very different story. It’s the story of a contemporary phenomenon that I call the New Groupthink—a phenomenon that has the potential to stifle productivity at work and to deprive schoolchildren of the skills they’ll need to achieve excellence in an increasingly competitive world. The New Groupthink elevates teamwork above all else. It insists that creativity and intellectual achievement come from a gregarious place. It has many powerful advocates. “Innovation—the heart of the knowledge economy—is fundamentally social,” writes the prominent journalist Malcolm Gladwell. “None of us is as smart as all of us,” declares the organizational consultant Warren Bennis,

Kindness is not a word much at home in current political and religious speech, but it is a rich word and a necessary one. There is good reason to think that we cannot live without it. Kind is obviously related to kin, but also to race and to nature. In the Middle Ages kind and nature were synonyms. Equal, in the famous phrase of the Declaration of Independence, could be well translated by these terms: All men are created kin, or of a kind, or of the same race or nature.

As soon as Saladin was in control of Egypt, he set his sights on a larger goal. He organized his state according to Islamic law and began removing Shiite influence in Egypt. This boosted his reputation and influence in the Muslim world, especially when he declared that he was the protector of the Sunni Orthodoxy. Saladin decided that he wanted to form a Muslim coalition, which would prove to be an extremely difficult task. The Muslim world was made up of highly independent states with their own rulers. Some of those states were made up of Shia Muslims, which meant that Saladin had to overcome regional and religious differences. Sometime in 1174, he uncovered a plot to put the Fatimids back in power, and he dealt with the traitors in a swift and brutal manner. He also built several mosques and madrasahs in order to expand Sunni influence within Egypt. His popularity among the Sunni Muslims grew, and he appointed Sunni Muslims to positions within the government and courts. Saladin allowed Egyptians to hold power within his government, which gave him insight into the traditions of the Egyptian populace. He was famously tolerant of other religions and allowed Coptic Christians and Jews to continue practicing their beliefs. During Saladin’s reign, the Egyptian economy continued to flourish as it had during the Fatimid Caliphate. Muslim Coalition In 1174, Saladin managed to capture Damascus, which was an impressive feat. From there, he went on to conquer Aleppo, Mosul, and Yemen. He soon came to control the Red Sea region, which brought him one step closer to his ultimate goal. However, Saladin didn’t simply rely on military methods to gain new territories. He was an adept diplomat who fostered strong relationships with other leaders, which gave him many allies. In order to establish the legitimacy of his rule, he married Nur al-Din’s widow since she was the daughter of a previous ruler of Damascus. Saladin also won widespread respect in the Muslim world by taking the lead in the efforts to protect Islam against the invading Christians. While Saladin proclaimed to be a protector of Islam, he had no problem fighting Muslim enemies. The caliph of Baghdad recognized most of Saladin’s authority, but Aleppo remained beyond his reach. It was ruled by Nur al-Din’s

the second paragraph of the Declaration that is very much an expression of Jefferson’s imagination. It envisions a perfect world, at last bereft of kings, priests, and even government itself. In this never-never land, free individuals interact harmoniously, all forms of political coercion are unnecessary because they have been voluntarily internalized, people pursue their own different versions of happiness without colliding, and some semblance of social equality reigns supreme. As Lincoln recognized, it is an ideal world that can never be reached on this earth, only approached. And each generation had an obligation to move America an increment closer to the full promise, as Lincoln most famously did. The American Dream, then, is the Jeffersonian Dream writ large, embedded in language composed during one of the most crowded and congested moments in American history by an idealistic young man who desperately wished to be somewhere else.

Consider Thomas Jefferson’s most famous line from the Declaration of Independence, and how abysmally wrong the Left is in its interpretation of it: 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. The key point here is that all people are created equal—not that all people are equal.

She knows that she was named for Molly Molasses, a famous Penobscot Indian born the year before America declared its independence from England. Molly Molasses lived into her nineties, coming and going from Indian Island, and was said to possess m’teoulin, power given by the Great Spirit to a few for the good of the whole. Those who possess this power, her dad said, could interpret dreams, repel disease or death, inform hunters where to find game, and send a spirit helper to harm their enemies.

Castine is a quiet town with a population of about 1,500 people in Western Hancock County, Maine, named after John Hancock, when Maine was a part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He was the famous statesman, merchant and smuggler who signed the “Declaration of Independence” with a signature large enough so that the English monarch, King George, could read it without glasses. Every child in New England knows that John Hancock was a prominent activist and patriot during the colonial history of the United States and not just the name of a well-known Insurance Company. Just below the earthen remains of Fort George, on both sides of Pleasant Street, lays the campus of Maine Maritime Academy. Prior to World War II, this location was the home of the Eastern State Normal School, whose purpose was to train grade school teachers. Maine Maritime Academy has significantly grown over the years and is now a four-year college that graduates officers and engineers for the United States Merchant Marine, as well as educating students in marine-related industries such as yacht and small craft management. Bachelor Degrees are offered in Engineering, International Business and Logistics, Marine Transportation, and Ocean Studies. Graduate studies are offered in Global Logistics and Maritime Management, as well as in International Logistics Management. Presently there are approximately 1,030 students enrolled at the Academy. Maine Maritime Academy's ranking was 7th in the 2016 edition of Best Northern Regional Colleges by U.S. News and World Report. The school was named the Number One public college in the United States by Money Magazine. Photo Caption: Castine, Maine

On the Jewish side, the war years passed in the shadow of the White Paper, with its restrictions on immigration, a ban on most land purchases, and the prospect of an independent state in which the Jews would become a permanent minority. David Ben-Gurion famously pledged to ‘fight the White Paper as if there were no war and to fight the war as if there were no White Paper’. He also declared that just as the First World War had given birth to the Balfour Declaration, this new conflict should give the Jews their own state. Even before news of mass killings of Jews began to filter out of Nazi-occupied Europe, facilitating illegal immigration had become a preoccupation for Zionist institutions. Running the British blockade became a national mission. In November 1940, a rickety ship called the Patria sank in Haifa harbour after Haganah operatives miscalculated the force of a bomb they had planted. The intention had been to cripple the vessel and prevent the deportation of its Jewish passengers, but in the event three hundred drowned. Far worse was to come. In January 1942 the Wannsee Conference in Berlin secretly drew up operational plans for Hitler’s ‘final solution’. In February, an old cattle transport called the Struma was hit by a mine or torpedo and sank in the Black Sea, where it had been sent by the Turkish authorities after the British refused to transfer its Romanian Jewish refugees to Palestine. This time the death toll was 768, a grim dramatization of the plight of Jews fleeing for their lives and the impossibility of relying on British goodwill. ‘The Zionists,’ said Moshe Shertok, ‘do not mean to exploit the horrible tragedy of the Jews of Europe but they cannot refrain from emphasising the fact that events have totally proven the Zionist position on the solution of the Jewish problem. Zionism predicted the Holocaust decades ago.

Frederic Morrow, adviser to the Commerce Department and later the first Black man to hold an executive position at the White House, commented that most of the white secretaries in the office steno pool refused to work for him, even as he was routinely insulted and sidelined by the administration supposedly soliciting his opinion. He would go on to become the first Black vice president of Bank of America and write several books, including Black Man in the White House. Claire’s other employer, Senator Margaret Chase Smith from Maine, is an equally impressive historical figure. A lone voice to speak out on the Senate floor against McCarthy, she delivered the famous Declaration of Conscience outlining four basic principles of Americanism: the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to hold independent thought. An enraged McCarthy did his best to destroy her, but she outlasted him, remaining a senator until 1973. It was remarked that if a man had delivered the Declaration of Conscience, he would have been the next president. Arlene

I believe in travel. I believe that by disorienting us, it rearranges us. Travel builds character and ignites imagination, nurtures independence and humility, catalyzes curiosity and self-examination. It can be a bulwark against stagnation, and a call to action. It widens our worldview and brings us face-to-face with our privilege, as it forces us to reassess entrenched beliefs and long-held concepts. Of course, travel is no magical elixir. I've stopped believing it's 'fatal to prejudice,' as Mark Twain famously declared (if only it were that simple), but I do hold that it's a solid start toward upending our biases and assumptions, because it compels us to see beyond the abstractions of a foreign land to its humanity. But travel has a shadow side, too: there's the environmental impact of flying and cruising, the crowding of our planet's most wondrous places, the littering of sacred sites, the pricing-out of locals. And it has dreadful roots (colonialism, capitalism) and gruesome side effects (exploitation, exoticism, saviorism). I wrestle with this duality. How do I reconcile the damage travel does with the awareness that it profoundly enriches my life; that it is not only my livelihood but also, at time, my sanity? It's another area in which I get hopelessly lost. And while I may never navigate this ethical tangle, I recognize that travel itself is what helps me make sense of - or at least pay more attention to - a world both exquisite and unbearably cruel.

In the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson translated this idea into the famous words: “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…” What is interesting about this sentence is that “these truths” are anything but self-evident. They would have been regarded as subversive by Plato, who held that humanity is divided into people of gold, silver and bronze and that hierarchy is written into the structure of society.[7] They would have been incomprehensible to Aristotle who believed that some were born to rule and others to be ruled.[8] They are “self-evident” only to one steeped in the Bible.

The spread of ISIL’s bloody rule changed the political calculus for all three factions in Baghdad, forcing them to think like the old American revolutionary Ben Franklin. “We must all hang together,” Franklin had famously said, at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “or assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

The Meaning of Democracy.” The request got White thinking. “Surely the Board knows what democracy is,” he wrote in the magazine. “It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.” “I love it!” Roosevelt said when he read the piece, which he would later quote, adding happily: “Them’s my sentiments exactly.” They were Churchill’s, too, though he would have phrased the point in a more ornate way. The Americans and the British, he said at Fulton in 1946, “must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence

Yet the idea that all humans are created equal is also a myth. In what sense do all humans equal one another? Is there any objective reality, outside the human imagination, in which we are truly equal? Are all humans equal to one another biologically? Let us try to translate the most famous line of the American Declaration of Independence into biological terms: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, the they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." According to the science of biology, people were not 'created'. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be 'equal'. The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are 'equal'? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. 'Created equal' should therefore be translated into 'evolved differently'. Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a 'Creator" who 'endows" them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals. 'Endowed by their creator' should be translated simply into 'born'. Similarly, there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities and characteristics. Birds fly not because they have a right to fly, but because they have wings. And it's not true that these organs, abilities and characteristics are 'unalienable'. Many of them undergo constant mutilations, and may well be completely lost over time. The ostrich is a bird that lost its ability to fly. So 'unalienable rights' should be translated to 'mutable characteristics'. And what are the characteristics that evolved in humans? 'Life', certainly. But 'liberty'? There is no such thing in biology. Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty too is a political ideal rather than a biological phenomenon. From a purely biological viewpoint, there is little difference between the citizens of a republic and the subjects of a king. And what about 'happiness'? So far biological research has failed to come up with a clear definition of happiness or a way to measure it objectively. Most biological studies acknowledge only the existence of pleasure, which is more easily defined and measured. So 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of pleasure'. So here is that line from the American Declaration of Independence translated into biological terms: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics' and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure." Advocates of equality and human rights may be outraged by this line of reasoning. Their response is likely to be, "We know that people are not equal biologically! But if we believe that we are all equal in essence, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society." I have no argument with that. This is exactly what I mean by 'imagined order". We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.