WASHINGTON —

In the next several days Simon & Schuster will bring forth “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written,” and in its mere 67 pages the author Walter Isaacson reminds us about the enduring values that define a troubled country.

That sentence, once memorized by every American pupil, is hard-wired into the country’s consciousness, though sometimes honored only in the breach. It is the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence:

“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.”

It stands, along with an astonishing phrase “We the people” from the opening of the Constitution, written a dozen years later, as the defining

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