"Yesterday we celebrated an event that took place in the 18th century. It is an unusual event to commemorate with a holiday — not the first shot in a battle or the toppling of a government but the broadcasting, as it was in those days, of a proposition about the nature and the rights of human beings. How fruitful, how reasonable, how correct that proposition was, we have seen again and again throughout our history.
That proposition was the Declaration of Independence.We know the words well, but they bear repeating: “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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”The men responsible for the ideas in that document could, of course, know nothing of our world, and even with all the aids of history, we can hardly imagine what it was like to be alive in theirs, in 1776.
How capacious an idea the Declaration contains becomes clear when you realize that it still contains us all, however we vote, however we choose to celebrate this day.We live in our historical moment. And yet we are the product of a very different moment, a time when a group of men, driven onward by the pen of Thomas Jefferson, felt certain they could enunciate truths that were universal, good for all time.
Their claims were stunningly bold, both politically and philosophically. There are intellectual precedents to the Declaration. But there is only one Declaration. We are still enacting its thesis, still, after all these years, learning how to embody its aspirations. It is not just a matter of trying to remain true to Jefferson’s words. The strength and the wonder of this country is that the words remain true to us."
