“We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident, IN that All Men Are Created Equal"
Walter Isaacson on “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written."
Walter Isaacson, biographer of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Ben Franklin, and Jennifer Doudna, represents the best of the American liberal establishment. For example, his biography of Dr. Doudna, co-inventor of the CRISPR gene-editing technique, devotes a major chunk of the book to a sympathetic portrayal of her mentor, the cancelled James D. Watson.
Isaacson has a new book coming out. From the Harvard Gazette:
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
November 21, 2025… Walter Isaacson’s new book, “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written,” takes as its focal point the document’s second line: “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.” …
Q. What makes this particular sentence “the greatest”?
A. I think it’s a sentence that gives the mission statement for what our country can be.
I would think that the 55 words of the Preamble to the Constitution would constitute the mission statement of at least the government of our country: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
But the climactic phrase “to ourselves and our posterity” tends to sound awfully nativist, so the Preamble has been phased out, along with Washington’s isolationist Farewell Address in favor of Founding Father Emma Lazarus’s “huddled masses/wretched refuse” poem.
Personally, I’d nominate for inclusion in our great founding documents Franklin’s 1754 immigration-restrictionist essay Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind which gave first Malthus and then Darwin the inspiration for their theoretical breakthroughs. Darwin explained his theory of affordable family formation:
6. Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry; for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their Children when grown up are to be provided for, they see that more Land is to be had at Rates equally easy, all Circumstances considered.
7. Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe.
But Isaacson, normally a very bright man, was so stumped by the implications of Franklin’s brilliant logic that he could only laugh nervously at what his hero was saying, scoff derisively, and quickly move on to more congenial aspects of Ben’s thought.
A. We’re about to enter our 250th birthday, and we’re so polarized that we’re not in the mood for a birthday party. And I think it’s important for people to focus on what’s the mission of our country, what common values do we share, and maybe that’ll lower some of the temperature at least for a year, so that we can have a 250th celebration.
Q. The drafting committee made a number of important edits to the original text. Which ones were particularly meaningful?
A. Jefferson writes the first draft. He sends it over to Benjamin Franklin on Market Street in Philadelphia, and said, “Would the good Dr. Franklin, with his great wisdom, help improve this?”
Jefferson had started that second sentence by saying, “We hold these truths to be sacred.” And you see on that draft, the dark black slashes that Benjamin Franklin used when he was editing documents, and he changes “sacred” to “self-evident.” They were trying to create a new type of nation in which our rights were based on rationality, not on the dictates or dogma of a religion.
But then, Jefferson says that they’re “endowed with certain rights,” and John Adams puts “endowed by their Creator.” So, you can see just in those edits, our founders balancing the role of divine providence and the role of rationality in creating our rights.
I also went back to figure out what did Franklin mean by “self-evident”? You think, “Maybe that’s just a fancy way to say obvious?” No. Franklin had just been staying in Scotland at the home of David Hume, who had come up with the concept of certain truths that were true by reason or by definition, like “all bachelors are unmarried,” and those self-evident truths he built a philosophy on by contrasting them with synthetic truths, like “Philadelphia is bigger than Charleston.”
And so, you can see when they say people are equal, they don’t mean that they surveyed different people and said, “They’re all equal.” They say, it’s self-evident they’re equal because of the way we enter the social contract. Those were the things I was trying to explore.
I think it gives us some sense of common values that may make our discussion of history a little bit less disputatious, to use Franklin’s word.
Q. The phrase “all men are created equal” referred only to land-owning white men. Indeed, 41 of 56 of the signers enslaved people. How aware were the signers of the contradiction between this lofty statement and their own reality?
A. They were very aware of the contradiction, even Jefferson, who enslaved more than 400 people and didn’t free most of his slaves even when he died.
But I think they understood the sentence would not only endure, it would grow. It was an aspirational sentence. And of course, the horrible contradiction in the sentence is that Jefferson can write “all men are created equal” and still be an enslaver.
Who can forget Jefferson, braving malaria, wandering around Africa enslaving free Africans?
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