The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and 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 separation.
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.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
[...]
To read the long train of abuses and who the 56 signatories were, click the link





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I’d post the entire thing (I don’t think the author would mind) but I don’t want to use too much bandwidth
Happy 4th ;-)
PS If you’re interested, and want to read a few books on how real people actually were the impetus for the Revolution, read the two books I mentioned here @ comment 44 and the book @ comment 68
Then there’s Leonard Levy’s seminal work
http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781566632706-1
http://yalepress.yale.edu/book…..0300089011
Happy 4th
I’m going fishing
L8r
Recommended. Thank you, John, for perhaps the most impressive and appropriate celebration of our nation’s birth that I have ever viewed.
Thanks for this. These words are as inspiring now as when they were written two hundred thirty-three years ago.
Those were daring words in a world that defined itself by followership of kings and monarchs, even when their whims were modified by limited representative parliaments. They were potentially lethal as aspirations for those who wrote them, doubly so for those who lived by them.
Most of all they denote courage, painfully absent among those Villagers who would pull up the Beltway drawbridge and govern as absentee landlords, adrift in a country they never visit and whose needs they rarely attend to.
The Beltway Boys treat those words like wealthy medieval popes and bishops treated Jesus’ words of poverty, empathy and leadership, and like they treated the Bible’s prophets, who excoriated the excesses of petty Near Eastern princes. They relegated them to the margins, as myths and sayings “not relevant” to their “modern” world.