“‘This is living!’ ‘I gotta be me!’ ‘Ain’t we got fun!’ It’s all there in the Declaration of Independence. We are the only nation in the world based on happiness. Search as you will the Maga Charta, the /Communist Manifesto/, the Ten Commandments, the Analects of Confucius, Plato’s /Republic/, the New Testament or the UN Charter, and find me any happiness at all.
There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence.
To modern ears they still sound reasonable, in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.
— P.J.O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores (1991)
That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
Words of the Sentient 