My favorite part of the Declaration of Independence is in the second paragraph:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident...To secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." (emphasis by Citizen)
Its almost as though Jefferson and the signers were pointing the way to the next step in the evolution beyond compulsory government: government genuinely based on consent.
I went for years without realizing the implication of that phrase about consent in the Declaration: consent, to be true, would have to mean the individual being governed consented to be governed. And, it would have to be real consent; not acquiescence, not voting defensively, not taken as implied by voting, not taken as implied by not moving to another country, but the real genuine article--totally voluntary consent freely given.
Another angle struck me, too. Why bother with consent? Why did Jefferson include it? Why did Locke?* It dovetails with "all men are created equal". If you and I are equal, I cannot possibly rule you legitimately without your consent. Lacking your personal consent, the only way I could justify ruling you is by setting myself above you, or setting you below me. If you and I are equals, I have no more standing to tell you what to do than you I. No amount of excuse or rationalization can explain that away: if I govern you without first obtaining your actual, genuine consent, then I cannot possibly also believe you and I are equal. I must unbalance the equality or excuse away somehow, some way, my rule over you. Equality necessitates consent. Rule without genuine, true consent necessarily means I don't really consider you my equal.
*The ideas about unalienable rights, equality, and consent of the governed in the Declaration of Independence actually come from John Locke's Second Treatise on Government, 1689. In a couple places, the text of the Declaration is verbatim Locke. Thomas Jefferson was not plagiarizing when he wrote the Declaration. The ideas were some 85 years old by the time Jefferson used them. The ideas had permeated English culture and political thought. Years after the Declaration, John Adams remarked that the language in the second paragraph was trite. How does a saying become trite? By being used a lot. How does it come to be used a lot? Lots of people use it.
Now for the really cool part. Among Thomas Jefferson's personal papers is an invoice for some books he ordered from England. Listed on that invoice is a copy of John Locke's Second Treatise. So, while Jefferson probably learned about The Second Treatise years earlier in college, historians actually have hard evidence of Locke's influence on Jefferson. Historians can prove that Jefferson owned a copy of Second Treatise.