Last November, on a quiet Sunday morning spent watching CBS Sunday Morning, I heard Ken Burns say something that stopped me cold.
Sitting across from John Dickerson, Burns was previewing his new PBS documentary, “The American Revolution” a six-part, 12-hour epic nearly a decade in the making. He called the American Revolution the most significant event since the birth of Jesus Christ. And then he observed that the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence was the most important sentence in the English language – second only to “I love you.”
I put my coffee down. I think most people would have.
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.”
Thirty-five words.
Thirty-five words that did not declare independence – the rest of the document handled that. They were doing something far more radical. They were putting into plain, unapologetic language an idea that had never been expressed quite that way before: that human beings are born equal, that their rights come not from a king or a parliament but from their Creator, and that among those rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In a document making the case for political separation, this sentence made the case for human dignity itself.
Of course, the sentence was imperfect from the beginning. The men who wrote it and signed it did not fully live up to it. Many Americans – women, Black Americans, Indigenous people, people without property, and others – were left outside the promise it so boldly declared.
And still, the words mattered. They matter now. That may be the most important lesson.
Walter Isaacson’s recent book, “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written,” unpacks those 35 words with the precision you’d expect from one of America’s most celebrated biographers, revealing how each phrase was chosen, debated, and refined until it said exactly what it needed to say. Jefferson drafted it. Franklin made it sharper. And together, a room full of imperfect but determined men committed to paper an idea so audacious it’s still catching up with itself 250 years later.
That’s the part worth sitting with.
Because the sentence isn’t a monument. It’s a dare.
It set an aspiration, a standard the nation has wrestled with every generation since – sometimes heroically, sometimes falling short, but always with those words pulling us forward. The tension between what we declared and how we’ve lived is not a flaw in the design. It is the design.
Those words gave future generations something to point back to, argue from, and build upon. They gave people who were excluded from the original promise the language to demand that the promise be made real.
And we have been doing that ever since. Imperfectly. Persistently. Sometimes grudgingly. But we have.
Here’s what we forget. We argue about politics, policy, and culture as though those fights are the whole story. They’re not. Underneath all of it – underneath the noise and the very real disagreements – is a sentence that every American shares.
It doesn’t belong to a party, a movement, or a moment. It belongs to a child in a classroom in Edenton, North Carolina; a farmer in Plainview, Nebraska; a new citizen raising her hand in a courthouse in Los Angeles, California; and every person who has ever believed America can be better than it was yesterday.
We are in the words business at E&V. We help people find the right ones – words that clarify, connect, challenge, persuade, and move people to act.
That work has taught us something important: words are never just words. They can open doors or close them. They can build trust or erode it. They can simplify what feels complex, or make people feel even more distant from the decisions shaping their lives. And sometimes, when chosen well, words can give people hope.
Now that the nation’s 250th celebration has passed us by, I’d offer this: Go back and read that sentence. Don’t skim it. Don’t recite it from memory. Actually read it slowly, the way you would read something that matters.
Because it does.
Those 35 words are some of the most consequential words ever committed to paper. They helped found a nation that inspired millions. They have been invoked by people seeking liberty here and around the world. They were not perfect, and neither were the people who wrote them. But they gave us a beginning – a set of words powerful enough to dare us to build something the world had never seen.
And we’re still building it today.