Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes
... any citizen should be willing to give all that he has to give his country in work or sacrifice in times of crisis.
Roosevelt, Eleanor. This I Remember. Harper & Brothers, 1949.
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.
Monroe was Secretary of War at the time and wanted to raise an army to invade Canada. Congress debated the option but the War of 1812 ended and so did the conscription proposal. See Daniel Webster’s opposition to Monroe’s idea.
Many who oppose taxation of all kinds are very distressed by this quotation from Washington. This was made 4 years before the Constitutional Convention. Those who oppose military conscription are also not enamored by this quotation.
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.
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was an American political figure, diplomat and activist. She served as the First Lady of the United States from March 4, 1933, to April 12, 1945, during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt's four terms in office, making her the longest-serving First Lady of the United States. Roosevelt served as United States Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1945 to 1952. President Harry S. Truman later called her the "First Lady of the World" in tribute to her human rights achievements.
