This is my first time commenting, and if I need to provide a source I will. It just seems like common knowledge. Anyways, we're learning about this in AP world.
John Locke, an English philosopher said this quote. As I'm sure you noticed, it is very similar to what Thomas Jefferson wrote for our Declaration of Independence. Jefferson actually revered Locke, and back then plagiarizing someone wasn't really a bad thing.
It was the Englishman John Locke, who is the founding thinker behind the classical liberal school of political philosophy.
He also devoted time to the concept of empiricism, which is the concept that all knowledge is acquired a posteriori, which was in direct conflict with the pre-existing concept of nativism, as promoted by philosophers such as Decartes.
Locke's pioneering, if stubborn and conceited views on the origins of knowledge are some of the earliest examples of using the straw man method of argument to push his views, which also crept uncomfortably into the territory of tacit concent within a weak state, where either by a product of the times he was lived in, or simple narrow-mindedness, did not seperate the mundane from the divine when addressing how humanity was capable of interpreting the miasma of sensory data as a tabula rasa without first having a priori knowledge of the world. An idea that was only really developped by the delightfully insane Prussian lunatic Kant.
The man claimed that human nature was by virtue of itself rational and self-interested, which as you can imagine has influenced the thoughts - for better and for worse - behind Capitalism, of which Locke appeared to be an early supporter of, as the man profited from the investments in real estate and shipping.
If I recall, he travelled to the early New England colonies, and I believe he did some work on helping plot out the distribution of homesteads to settlers, but I admit lack of knowledge on those years.