Abraham Lincoln Quotes

This country was founded upon the principle that we are all endowed with certain inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - those rights are what make America great, and they belong to each and every one of us.

All men are by nature born equally free and independent.

The ultimate end is a nation that lies under the concept of the Declaration of Indepen dence. The Declaration of Independence is such an extraordinary statement - it was designed by people skeptical of government, local or national, but in particular national.

We have a long heritage of freedom that defines America. We believe there is a Creator who blessed us with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

What vested rights so high or so sacred as a man’s right to himself, to his wife and children, to his liberty, and to the fruits of his own industry? Did not our fathers declare that those rights were inalienable?

The Republic may not give wealth or happiness; she has not promised these. It is the freedom to pursue these, not their realization, which the Declaration of Independence claims.

Our basic rights declaring document: The Declaration of Independence.

Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Liberty is an individual, not a collective, right.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way round. Human rights invented America.

I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal …

Our nation was not founded because we all looked alike, or prayed alike, or descended from the same family tree. But our founders, in their genius, in this, the oldest constitutional democracy, put forth on this earth the idea that all are created equal; that we all have inalienable rights.

I believe that, as Americans, our freedoms come from God and not government, and include the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

America is truly special because it's founded on an idea. It's the ideological and philosophical equivalent of a formless God, in other words, you know? It's, again, the only great country in the world that it is formed out of words.

America is great not because it's a team. America is great because it is a nation whose founding documents elevated the rights of the individual.

A man is born free.

The Declaration is a magnificent document.

Our nation was founded on the principals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Government itself is founded upon the great doctrine of the consent of the governed, and has its cornerstone in the memorable principle that men are endowed with inalienable rights.

What began as a revolt in response to the King of Great Britain's repeated injuries against the colonies, soon became a passionate and glorious call to fight for the beginnings of a new country.

Our founders got it right when they wrote in the Declaration of Independence that our rights come from nature and nature's God, not from government.

The common Notions of Liberty are not from School Divines, but from Nature.

Today, we stand as a united country and are much closer to the ideals set forth in our Constitution 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.

The British were white, English, and Protestant, just as we were. They had to have some other basis on which to justify independence, and happily they were able to formulate the inalienable truths set forth in the Declaration.