Richard Salter Storrs Quotes
The man who has given himself to his country loves it better; the man who has fought for his friend honors him more; the man who has labored for his community values more highly the interests he has sought to conserve; the man who has wrought and planned and endured for the accomplishment of God's plan in the world sees the greatness of it, the divinity and glory of it, and is himself more perfectly assimilated to it.
Richard Salter Storrs, 1821–1900, Congregational Minister & Theologian, Quoted in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers, 1895
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Beaumarchais had provided the Americans with credit in the amount of ½ million French Livres. However, Beaumarchais served the French King Louis XVI as a spy and advisor on foreign affairs. The money had been secretly provided by the French government to help the American cause while still being able to officially deny to England that they were in any way involved in the rebellion. The American agent, Silas Dean, who arranged for the loan saw through the ruse. See {624186} and {624184}.
Joseph Addison had earlier written of such a situation. Recent research has strongly suggested that Hale may never have said these words. The American patriots wanted to have heroes and may not have been too worried about the documentation and historical research. See {621112}
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.
Compare Nathan Hale's last words.
This is a precursor to the famous JFK inaugural address quotation. See also, Khalil Gibran {601423} and Warren G. Harding {622594} and {629021}.
Russell despised the Commission Chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren and had refused to serve. Johnson changed Russell's mind. See Richard B. Russell.
