Is the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence the greatest sentence ever written?

That’s the contention of historian Walter Isaacson in his slim new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. As a refresher:

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.

“[E]ach of its words and concepts bears scrutiny and appreciation,” Isaacson says, and then goes about in short chapter-length essays to do just that.[1]

Or almost so. His execution doesn’t go off with quite that kind of exactness. For instance, “hold” doesn’t get any particular attention. The verbs is always the most important word in a sentence because it’s the engine that drives the action. One could spend a little time on “hold” and its specific meaning and the perils inherent in it (anything held can be dropped!). Isaacson may or may not have missed opportunities by skipping some of the words that he apparently deemed unimportant.

But where he does parse out parts of the sentence, he shines. He explores the common ground of “We,” what made “truths” “self-evident,” and the restrictiveness behind the seemingly inclusive “all men.” What is “equality” in the context of the rest of the sentence? What did the Founders mean by any of these things?

Context is the key in each of Isaacson’s essays, which provide useful analysis and sometimes brief but always-thoughtful punch. He dips into the great Enlightenment figures who influenced not only Jefferson as the primary author of the Declaration but who also influenced Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, the other key members of the five-man drafting committee. (Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert Livingston of New York, the other members, often get overlooked in accounts of the Declaration’s origin, and Isaacson mostly ignores them here, too.)

Isaacson treats David Hume, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as supporting characters because their ideas underpinned those of the committee. Similarly, George Mason’s underappreciated Declaration of Rights, written in June 1775, gets frequent plugs, reminding us that Jefferson drew on a multitude of sources. “[W]hether I had gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I know only that I turned to neither book or pamphlet while writing it,” Jefferson claimed years later in a letter to James Madison. “I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether & to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.”[2]

Isaacson connects the dots between the great philosophers, Jefferson’s first draft, and the committee’s revisions. It’s a wonderful exploration of political thought. Anyone who thinks they know what the Declaration means would do well to follow Isaacson’s explorations and see what it actually meant to the men who wrote it.

Jefferson, as primary author, holds center stage in the book. Isaacson particularly admires Jefferson’s talent for “felicitous” phrasing. (See, for example, Isaacson’s brief discussion of “unalienable” vs. “inalienable.”) But Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin stands as the modern best, so it’s little wonder that the Philadelphia polymath plays a prominent role in the book, too.

However, Isaacson tends to steamroll the other important member of the committee, Adams. For instance, in Isaacson’s account, when Jefferson finished his first draft, he took it to Franklin for feedback. In fact, as Jefferson himself noted, “I communicated it separately to Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams requesting their corrections; because they were the two members of whose judgments and amendments I wished most to have the benefit before presenting it to the Committee. . . .”

Adams’s most prominent role in the book comes during the discussion of the phrase “endowed by their Creator,” which Adams inserted after scratching out Jefferson’s original “from that equal creation, they derive rights.” (A substitution that suggests Jefferson was not the only committee member with powers of felicitous expression.) Jefferson, a Deist, didn’t believe in a God who interfered in the lives of people; Adams, a Unitarian, had views more conventional for the time. Isaacson’s discussion of the differences illuminates the Declaration’s text.

Ultimately, Isaacson wants us all to see the Declaration better, with more clarity and perhaps a bit more urgency. “As we reach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, we are embroiled in increasingly polarized debates over policies . . .” he writes. To restore stability—a key precept of the Founders—Isaacson suggests focusing on “two ideals that are at the heart of the Declaration’s key sentence: common ground and the pursuit of the American Dream.”[3] The final short chapters of the book explain what those two ideals meant to the Founders and what they might mean today, and then argues for their importance as modern touchstones.

While Isaacson references modern politics in his final discussion, one would be hard-pressed to place his ideas as either “left” or “right”—hardly surprising since the Founders themselves would have defied modern categorization. “Their goal on contentious issues was not to triumph but to find the right balance, an art that has been lost today,” Isaacson contends.[4]

The book is short—only 67 pages, 41 of which are actual essay. The remaining 26 pages consist of excerpts from the aforementioned philosophers, the first and final drafts of the Declaration of Independence, and other short appendices. But the ideas are foundational, inspirational—essential, even—made all the more accessible by Isaacson’s clean prose. Isaacson wants us to engage. The Greatest Sentence presents a brief argument in favor of the Declaration of Independence as usable history at a time when we need more common ground. What better way to ground us than in our own foundational text?

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[1] Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2025), 2.

[2] “Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 30 August 1823,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/04-03-02-0113. [Original source: The Papers of James Madison, Retirement Series, vol. 3, 1 March 1823 – 24 February 1826, ed. David B. Mattern, J. C. A. Stagg, Mary Parke Johnson, and Katherine E. Harbury. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016, pp. 114–116.]

[3] Isaacson, 27.

[4] Isaacson, 31.