Explanation:   

    The phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” comes from the Declaration of Independence and it is something Americans talk a lot about.   These words were written by Thomas Jefferson.  He and the other men who wrote the Constitution believed that these are unalienable rights, that people are born with and that a government should not be given the power to take them away.  These words have become synonymous with (or have the same meaning as) the “American spirit” (or the way that Americans think and feel).  

 

    In the United States, the right to life is considered the most basic of all rights.  It’s exactly what it sounds like: the right to be alive.  It may seem funny that the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence included life as a right, but many of the earliest Americans had come from countries that did not take this right seriously. In many of these countries, governments executed (or killed) their own citizens.  This is why the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence included the right to life. 

 

    The second of Jefferson’s rights is the right to liberty (or freedom). The right to liberty is a person’s right to make his or her own decisions.  Again, many of the countries from which the earliest Americans came did not give their people this right. 

 

    The rights to life and liberty are easy to understand, but the third right, the right to the pursuit of happiness, is more vague (or unclear and difficult to understand).  To pursue is to work hard to get something, in this case, happiness. Happiness, of course, could mean anything a person wants to have: a job, a family, or a safe place to live.  The writers of the Declaration of Independence believed that the government should not interfere with (or get in the way of) a person’s right to pursue happiness.  The pursuit of happiness is exemplified by (or shown or seen in) many American rags-to-riches stories, where a person who is very poor becomes very rich because of their own hard work, including those of several U.S. Presidents.  

 

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