But we understand our liberty in a more positive sense as well, in the idea of opportunity and the subsidiary values that help realize opportunityall those homespun virtues that Benjamin Franklin first popularized in Poor Richard's Almanack and that have continued to inspire our allegiance through successive generations. The values of self-reliance and self-improvement and risk-taking. The values of drive, discipline, temperance, and hard work. The values of thrift and personal responsibility.These values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free willa confidence that through pluck and sweat and smarts, each of us can rise above the circumstances of our birth. But these values also express a broader confidence that so long as individual men and women are free to pursue their own interests, society as a whole will prosper.

The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama