All Men Are Created Equal
The quotation "All men are created equal" has been called an "immortal declaration", and "perhaps" the single phrase of the United States Revolutionary period with the most grand "continuing importance". Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase in the Declaration of Independence as a rebuttal to the going political theory of the day: the Divine Right of Kings. It was thereafter quoted or incorporated into speeches by a wide array of substantial figures in American political and social life in the United States. The final form of the phrase was stylized by Benjamin Franklin.
Read more about All Men Are Created Equal: Origin of Jefferson's Use of The Phrase, Slavery and The Phrase, Applications in American History, Hobbesian Origin
Famous quotes containing the words men, created and/or equal:
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“You were created of your name, the word
Is that of which you were the personage.
There is no life except in the word of it.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“A woman’s always younger than a man
At equal years.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)