Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui Quotes
A good subject makes it his rule to prefer the public welfare to everything else, bravely to sacrifice his fortune, and his private interests, and even his life, for the preservation of the state; and to employ all his abilities and his industry to advance the honor, and to procure the advantage of his native country.
Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, 1694–1750, Swiss Counsel of State & Political Philosopher, The Principles of Political Law, Part II, Chapter V, 1748
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Ataturk had been a military hero, but was very much opposed to war and military adventurism not unlike the Dwight Eisenhower and Colin Powell type leaders. However, the one thing that he thought worth the sacrifice of his own and other Turkish lives was Turkish independence and sovereignty. Historically, the Ottoman Empire which Ataturk finally ended, had dominated half of Europe and all of the Mid East at the cost of sovereignty of other nations and Ataturk saw no more important virtue with dying for than national sovereignty. See {125322} and {584501}.
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}
Quintus Horatius Flaccus
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.
The Society of Cincinnati was formed just after the Revolutionary War by officers of the army, to perpetuate friendships, to aid each other and the widows and orphans of members, and to honor their French allies and comrades:
Quintus Horatius Flaccus. This famous quotation has been echoed in virtually every language and every country of the world. However, see Ernest Hemingway for a counter view.
Bassi was one of the unique military chaplains in history. Instead of just ministering to the men spiritually, he marched at the head of the Italian revolutionary Army and was wounded in combat. Although he never carried arms, he was executed along with those who did.
The Poles were fighting the Russians. Pulaski was a Field Marshall. This was before he had come to America and fought in the American Revolution.
Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui was a Genevan legal and political theorist who popularised a number of ideas propounded by other thinkers.
