Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise today to speak about our Nation's independence. Some 244 years ago this Saturday, the Founding Fathers of this country voted to declare our independence from Great Britain. All Americans know the basics of this story, but not everyone knows the story behind one of our Nation's founding documents. Thomas Jefferson was just 33 years old when the Second Continental Congress commissioned him to draft a declaration of independence. When he sat down in a rented room in the heat of the Philadelphia summer to write it, the American Revolution had already begun. On one level, he was simply putting the reasons for independence into words. The first shot had been fired over a year earlier, after decades of increasingly tyrannical British abuses had culminated in open revolt in Massachusetts. Even so, it was not yet clear whether the delegates from all 13 colonies would put their names to a formal document declaring our independence. They had to be persuaded. After 17 days of writing and rewriting, struggling to find the right words, Jefferson presented his work to Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. He then submitted a draft to the Congress on July 1, which officially adopted it three days later. Each year on the Fourth of July, we celebrate this moment--the moment that we declared our independence from the British Empire and began to see ourselves as our own nation. I love Independence Day celebrations in Nebraska.…”