"Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” are specifically listed an unalienable rights in America’s Declaration of Independence and could be seen as the origin for many other “American values”.
The phrase itself is quite similar to John Locke’s "life, liberty, and estate” from Two Treatises of Government written nearly a century earlier. You can look to Voltaire, Hume, or really any other Enlightenment period philosopher or writer of the time to see that the founding fathers were a product of that time, and that the ideas of the century or so leading up to American independence are enshrined as values or rights in Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.
"Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” are specifically listed an unalienable rights in America’s Declaration of Independence and could be seen as the origin for many other “American values”.
The phrase itself is quite similar to John Locke’s "life, liberty, and estate” from Two Treatises of Government written nearly a century earlier. You can look to Voltaire, Hume, or really any other Enlightenment period philosopher or writer of the time to see that the founding fathers were a product of that time, and that the ideas of the century or so leading up to American independence are enshrined as values or rights in Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.