John F. Kennedy Quotes
Ask not what your country can do for you——ask what you can do for your country.
This may be Kennedy’s most famous line. However he was not the first orator to express this idea however. See Khalil Gibran {601423}, Warren G. Harding {622594} and {629021}, St. John Broderick {595734}, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. {603707} for earlier expressions of similar sentiments. Holmes seems to be the first to express the idea while the earliest seems similar phraseology seems to be the British Politician St. John Broderick in 1893 {595734}. Although, these earlier expressions existed, Theodore C. Sorensen, who assisted Kennedy with this speech and wrote the draft, had distilled it from earlier expressions and views of JFK and said that these were Kennedy’s words. At the time, he stated that was unaware of the Gibran, Harding, Broderick and Holmes sentiments. Gibran had not yet even been translated into English. However it is not clear whether Kennedy himself had inadvertently recollected the phrase from any of the other quotations. (The question was never put to him.) The St. John Broderick quotation is a possible source. Kennedy was quite familiar with British political history, and his father and been U. S. Ambassador to Great Britain. Regardless, the quotation was as great for the place and timing—his inaugural—as it was for the phraseology which might have originated elsewhere.
John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, 35th President of the United States (Democrat, MA), Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This is the libertarian-conservative flip of the famous JFK quotation {589867}.
This quotation might have been an inspiration for the famous JFK quotation {589867}. See Khalil Gibran {601423}, Warren G. Harding {622594} and {629021}, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. {603707} for similar sentiments. Holmes preceded Broderick by a few years, but Broderick came closest to the Kennedy phraseology.
See John F. Kennedy's famous 1961 inaugural quote {589867} for a more modern articulation targeted at all. The above quotation is from the Anthony R. Ferris translation of 1958. In an interesting play of influences, note the following Andrew Dib Sherfan’s 1975 translation done after the Kennedy inaugural address.
This is a precursor to the famous JFK inaugural address quotation. See also, Khalil Gibran {601423} and Warren G. Harding {622594} and {629021}.
This sentiment is conceptually remarkably similar to JFK’s famous quotation in his inaugural address {589867}, however there is no evidence that Kennedy or his speechwriter were aware of Harding’s speech.
See John F. Kennedy {589867} for a later expression of this concept. Also Khalil Gibran {601423} and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. {603707}
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, often referred to by his initials JFK, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. Kennedy served at the height of the Cold War, and the majority of his work as president concerned relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. A Democrat, Kennedy represented Massachusetts in both houses of the U.S. Congress prior to becoming president.
