We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men…

The sentence opens the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, after a preamble on why a people that dissolves its political bands must declare its reasons. It lays down the principles of what follows: governments are instituted to secure these rights and derive their just powers “from the consent of the governed”, and when a government becomes destructive of these ends, the people may alter or abolish it.

Jefferson drafted the text in Philadelphia in June 1776 for a committee including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin; his draft called these truths “sacred and undeniable” before the phrase became “self-evident”. Congress revised it, cutting a passage against the slave trade, and adopted it on 4 July 1776. Jefferson owned slaves all his life, a contradiction that has shadowed the sentence ever since.

Its words have been reclaimed again and again: by the women of Seneca Falls in 1848, who declared that “all men and women are created equal”, by Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863, and by Martin Luther King in 1963.

Declaration of Independence, second paragraph, 1776

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work