Ken Burns, on Face The Nation:

The pursuit of happiness is not the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. That’s what the founders said. To be virtuous, to live a virtuous life, to continually educate yourself is what was required to sustain this republic. And I think that’s what we’ve gotten away from. Everything is sort of all individualized. We’re all free agents. We don’t realize that freedom, the thing that we tout is not just what I want, but also that’s in tension with what we need. And I think what happens is that when we study these words, we can go back to the sense of newness and freshness that they represented and rededicate ourselves. And that means me for me and you for you to this idea that the pursuit of happiness is about lifelong learning. It’s about becoming ever more educated to the responsibility of citizenship. And that’s a huge, huge responsibility.