Ken Burns

Everybody has been under an authoritarian's boot and have been willing to suffer for that.

For a thousand years working someone else's land.

For a thousand years being a slave without even earning a farthing.

But this is going to be a new era.

This is going to be a place where we're going to replace your subjecthood with something much more responsible called citizenship.

So let's go back to Pursuit of Happiness.

We've always assumed this is the American license for freedom.

He didn't follow John Locke and said life, liberty, and property.

He said pursuit of happiness.

Happiness was not the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas.

If you did that, you would become more virtuous.

That was the free electron word throughout every episode of the revolution as we began to gather stuff.

John Adams is worrying about virtue.

Abigail's worrying about that.

George Washington.

Everybody, even the folks at the so-called bottom, are thinking about it.

And so virtue becomes a thing, reaching back across the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, back to antiquity.

The virtue that was going to make you...

able to assume the mantle of this and and adams at one point the great worrier says you know there's too much avarice and ambition too much lust for profit not enough virtue that i wonder whether we have the ability to create a republic so what happens is by isolating these words by getting great actors i have the best cast i think for any really ever made yeah bringing them to life in a way that you say oh i now know

what that means.