Orson Scott Card Quotes
Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.
Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game. Tor Books, 1985.
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.
This quotation gives us a concept of the WWII home front effort where virtually everyone in American society was personally involved on a daily basis in the war. See also {637440}. This was so dramatically different from the home fronts for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where most of the American public had no direct contact with the war effort and was not called upon or even needed to do anything.
Orson Scott Card is an American writer known best for his science fiction works. His novel Ender's Game (1985) and its sequel Speaker for the Dead (1986) won both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. A feature film adaptation of Ender's Game, which Card co-produced, was released in 2013. Card also wrote the Locus Fantasy Award-winning series The Tales of Alvin Maker (1987–2003).
