Humans have produced some great sentences over the years, such as this one from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
But in his book, Walter Isaacson has declared “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written” to be the second line of the Declaration of Independence: “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.”
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“It would be good to have a debate on what was the world’s greatest sentence ever written by human hand,” Isaacson said in a recent interview. “Fitzgerald has a brace of wonderful sentences in his novels, but none of them created a new type of nation.”
Isaacson is known for in-depth biographies of Ben Franklin, Henry Kissinger, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, but “The Greatest Sentence” is notable for its brevity: not counting appendices, it clocks in at just 41 small-format pages. Still, the idealistic Isaacson believes the book and that aspirational sentence have plenty to say.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Where did the idea come from?
I was thinking about the 250th birthday we’re about to have and thinking we’re in no mood to celebrate – we’re like a dysfunctional family that’s totally polarized.
I remember when I was young how, after Vietnam and Watergate, we celebrated the bicentennial, and we used the birthday to come together. I think we should all try to focus on how we can hang together as a nation. I think the founders realized that with this document, it was going to be a mission statement that would tie us together.
I was feeling that we should all do what we can for at least a year to say we share common values and common ground. People are sick and tired of the poison and divisiveness stoked by our politicians and by social media. I think 70% of the country is willing to say, “Let’s calm down. We’re not that hateful, resentful, and divisive.”
Maybe reflecting on the Declaration of Independence and the values of our founders will help lower the temperature and serve to unite us.
Q. Will the midterm elections help or hurt that ideal next year?
The winners of the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races ran on a platform of being a little bit less divisive and trying to be more pragmatic. If we can elect more people, Democrats and Republicans, who succeed not based on enragement, but on truly understanding our values, the midterms give us a chance. And the stage for the midterms is set perfectly by July 4th, 2026. That’s when the campaigning really begins.
Maybe if we have an anniversary celebration leading up to July 4th, 2026, it can get our heads in a space that will allow us to get up each morning and say, “What can I do to unite my community rather than divide it? And that includes, how am I going to vote this fall??
Q. Were you always an idealist or optimist about this, or did writing the book influence you?
I was influenced by writing about Benjamin Franklin. He was the founder who was best at uniting different elements. And he also was the one who helped define what our common ground can be. For example, he started the first police corps, volunteer fire department, Academy for the Education of Youth, a school, a library that’s open to all, a militia, a widows and orphans pension fund, and a small business revolving loan fund. He does all of these civic things. And I think that helps define what we should aspire to be in our communities.
Q. You write about Franklin’s personal growth and how his shifts on slavery can recast the Declaration as a document meant to allow for evolution.
Our country certainly has evolved over the years, and [so has our understanding] of what it means to say all men are created equal, because when Jefferson helped write that sentence, he enslaved more than 400 people.
Franklin had owned two or three slaves when he was a young printer. But he helped fund schools for slaves and free Blacks, and then became the president for the Society of Abolition of Slavery.
He kept a ledger of mistakes he made until he tried to rectify them. Each of us could have a bit of humility and say, “How have I evolved? How have my views changed?”
Sometimes we think that changing our views is a sign of weakness. Well, no, that’s a sign of growth.
And so the notion is not that we were all perfect in the beginning, either as a nation or as Ben Franklin, but that we aspire to certain ideals and then we work and hopefully progress to them.
So I think we have to look at this sentence as an aspirational sentence, and it’s still an unfinished project.
Q. You write about how the pursuit of happiness and how it’s good to reward the successful but how the wealthiest often push for increased inequality. Without a shared common good a legitimate pursuit of happiness more difficult.
It’s always a balance between what we allow to accumulate to private individuals and what we put in the commons, which is not there just to be charitable. It helps hold society together if everybody feels they have a stake in the stability of society, and it forms a foundation for the American dream, which is that every kid has an opportunity to succeed in America.
People that have been successful tend to realize they want to give back. People like Carnegie and Rockefeller and Mellon turned back to helping the common good. As have people like Bill Gates.
Q. But that’s profoundly anti-democratic, because the wealthy people decide what they want to prioritize, not what the country and its people need most.
I totally agree. We need a government that taxes and creates things for the common good. Different people will have different views of levels of taxation and how it should be. But that’s what a democracy is all about.
I don’t try to be prescriptive to say, “This is the way to do it.” But I make it clear, I hope, that we want a society where the basic foundation for having an opportunity is there for everybody. That includes safe schools, safe streets, decent healthcare.
That was the point of parsing the sentence, getting to the pursuit of happiness, and then saying, “How do we work towards a society that gives everybody what we would call the American dream, the opportunity to succeed?”
One thing that struck me is that we fail to do that. If you were born the decade I was born, you had an 80% chance of doing better than your parents. Now, it’s less than 50%. And that is a recipe for disaster, because we’re no longer a great land of opportunity for all.
Q. What’s the second-best sentence?
The other great sentence is, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth,” because it says we’re going to discuss our values through narrative storytelling rather than just being argumentative.
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