The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

Recommended: The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

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For America's 250th anniversary, Walter Isaacson wrote a small book that does one thing: it takes a single sentence apart and shows you why it may be the most powerful one in American history.

Here is the sentence. "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." 

You have known those words your whole life. Isaacson goes through them one at a time and shows you how little of it you ever actually stopped to think about.

Jefferson first wrote "we hold these truths to be sacred." Franklin crossed out "sacred" and wrote "self-evident." One word. It moved the country off religious authority and onto reason. Truth you can see for yourself, not truth handed down. 

There is a detail at the back worth the price alone. A note on the type. The book is set in Caslon, the same font Franklin brought over from London and used to print the first Declaration. So you are reading the sentence in the letters it was born in. That is the kind of care the whole book has. 

I read it in an afternoon. I thought about it for a week. 

If you work in words for a living, or you just care how a few of them built a nation, read it.