Helen McCrory Quotes
I think I was brought up with an innate sense of responsibility because my dad was in the Foreign Office where you were in somebody else's country, and you were aware of your behaviour. And my mum worked for the NHS, so you were aware of your responsibility to your country.
McCrory, Helen. "This Much I Know: Helen McCrory." The Observer, Guardian News & Media, 19 Oct. 2014.
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 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.
Theodore Roosevelt had just been nominated as Vice President and the Republicans were almost certain to win the general election. The Chairman was alsays very distressed by Roosevelt. The New York conservative Republicans leaders had pushed him out of the Governorship by getting him nominated as VP as NY business leaders were fearful of TR’s business reform ideas. Hanna worried that if TR ever reached a position of power, he would alienate business from the national Republican party. When McKinley was assassinated, Hanna’s worst fears were realized. See his reaction {585078}
Helen Elizabeth McCrory OBE was an English actress. After studying at the Drama Centre London, she made her stage debut in The Importance of Being Earnest in 1990. Other stage roles include playing Lady Macbeth in Macbeth at Shakespeare's Globe, Olivia in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You Like It in the West End.
