Scheduling Prevented Paul From Recording

THE GREATEST SENTENCE EVER WRITTEN
Walter Isaacson’s Timely Meditation on America’s Founding Creed
A Discussion, Elaboration, and Outline
Introduction: Thirty-Five Words That Built a Nation
There is something audacious about writing a book on a single sentence. But when the sentence in question is the second line of the Declaration of Independence—the one that begins “We hold these truths to be self-evident”—the audacity seems proportionate to the subject. Walter Isaacson’s The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, published by Simon & Schuster in November 2025, is a slim volume—barely 67 pages of main text—that punches well above its weight. Timed to the approach of America’s 250th birthday in 2026, the book is part historical detective story, part philosophical meditation, and part civic sermon. It is also, unmistakably, a plea: in an era of corrosive polarization, Isaacson wants Americans to remember what they agreed upon before they started disagreeing about everything else.
The premise is deceptively simple. Isaacson takes the 35-word sentence drafted by Thomas Jefferson, edited by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, and examines it the way a jeweler examines a stone—word by word, facet by facet. In doing so, he illuminates the Enlightenment philosophy, the political pragmatism, and the personal contradictions embedded in the language. The result is a book that reads quickly but lingers long, precisely because it forces the reader to slow down and actually think about words most Americans can recite from memory but rarely pause to examine.
The Drafting: A Masterclass in Collaborative Editing
One of the book’s great pleasures is its account of how the sentence came to be. Isaacson, who previously authored a definitive biography of Benjamin Franklin, is on familiar terrain here, and it shows. He walks the reader through four drafts of the sentence, reproducing Jefferson’s original text alongside the markups made by the drafting committee. The story of the editing process is itself a kind of parable about the value of collaboration, compromise, and the willingness to subordinate ego to purpose.
The most celebrated edit belongs to Franklin. Jefferson’s original draft read, “We hold these truths to be sacred.” Franklin, with his characteristic blend of wit and philosophical precision, crossed out sacred and wrote in self-evident. It is a small change that carries enormous weight. As Isaacson argues, the substitution moved the entire justification for American independence from the realm of religious dogma into the realm of rational inquiry. The new nation would ground its legitimacy not in divine decree alone, but in the power of reason—in truths so obvious they required no priestly authority to validate them.
And yet, the sentence does not abandon the divine altogether. John Adams contributed the phrase “endowed by their Creator,” replacing Jefferson’s more secular formulation that people simply “derive rights.” Isaacson reads this interplay as a deliberate balancing act—a synthesis of faith and reason, providence and philosophy, that would define the American experiment from its inception. The Founders were not choosing between God and Enlightenment. They were insisting on both, and daring the future to hold the tension.
The Philosophy: Enlightenment Ideas in American Soil
Isaacson is at his best when tracing the intellectual genealogy of the sentence’s key phrases. The concept of natural rights—rights that exist prior to and independent of government—runs through the work of John Locke, whose Second Treatise of Government directly influenced Jefferson’s thinking. But Isaacson extends the lineage further, noting Franklin’s month-long stay in David Hume’s home in the early 1770s, where the two men discussed natural rights and moral philosophy at length. The Scottish Enlightenment, with its emphasis on empiricism and common sense, left a deep imprint on the American founding—deeper, Isaacson suggests, than most standard histories acknowledge.
The phrase “the pursuit of Happiness” receives particular attention. Isaacson argues that in the context of 18th-century moral philosophy, happiness did not mean mere personal pleasure or contentment. It carried connotations of civic virtue, public contribution, and the opportunity for each generation to improve upon the circumstances of the last. The pursuit of happiness, in this reading, is inseparable from the concept of the commons—the shared infrastructure of schools, libraries, fire brigades, and public institutions that Franklin himself helped pioneer in Philadelphia. It is not a license for atomistic individualism; it is a compact about what a society owes to each of its members and what each member owes in return.
All Men Are Created Equal: The Nucleus of Life
The Conventional Reading
No serious treatment of the Declaration can sidestep the contradiction at its heart, and Isaacson does not attempt to. He notes bluntly that 41 of the 56 signers enslaved people. Jefferson himself enslaved more than 400 human beings over his lifetime and failed to free most of them even upon his death. Jefferson’s original draft included a passage condemning the King for perpetuating the slave trade—a passage that was struck during the editing process, a political compromise necessary to secure the signatures of slaveholding delegates. Isaacson frames the phrase “all men are created equal” as either a spectacular act of hypocrisy or a spectacular act of aspiration. He takes the latter view without excusing the former, arguing that the sentence set in motion what he calls “250 years of an unfinished project”—the ongoing struggle to make the Declaration’s ideals real for all Americans. Abraham Lincoln understood this. Frederick Douglass understood this. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this. The sentence was written as a promissory note, and every generation since has been called to honor or default on it.
This is a respectable reading, and it is the reading that dominates contemporary scholarship. But it is also, I would argue, an incomplete one. It is the yin without the yang. It treats the slavery contradiction as the interpretive center of the phrase, when in reality the phrase operates at a level so deep that slavery—abomination though it was and remains—is a subset of its meaning, not the totality of it. I wish Isaacson had consulted a wider range of interpretive voices on this point, because I believe the historical intent of those five words was far more radical, far more biological, and far more permanent than even their most ardent defenders typically acknowledge.
A Deeper Reading: Created Equal at the Moment of Conception
Here is the reading I have held for decades and will continue to hold: “All men are created equal” is a statement about the moment of creation itself. It is an acknowledgment that at the instant of conception, every human life begins with the same fundamental genetic architecture—the same miraculous blueprint that contains within it the full range of human possibility. Those five words are not primarily a political slogan about who gets to vote or who gets to sit at the lunch counter, though they have been rightly wielded for those purposes. At their root, they are a declaration about the nature of life itself. They are, quite literally, the nucleus of human existence expressed in political language.
This is a controversial statement, and I say that with full awareness of the reaction it provokes. To say that the meaning of “all men are created equal” reaches beyond the issue of slavery will strike many as dismissive of slavery’s horror. It is not. Slavery was and is an abomination. But the phrase is bigger than any single abomination, and to confine its meaning to the slavery debate is to shrink it to a size that its authors never intended and that its language does not support. The ov...