Helle Thorning-Schmidt Quotes
This is not an election where we hand out gifts. It is an election where we ask everyone to contribute more.
Thorning-Schmidt, Helle. Campaign Remarks. Quoted in MacCarthy, Clare. "Danes vote in tight election." Financial Times, The Financial Times Ltd., 15 Sept. 2011.
The King was asking for volunteers for the British Army. What is particularly interesting about this quote is the overt appeal to “men of all classes.” This illustrates that there was an extensive class system then operational in Britain. Almost all people knew to which class they belonged. A very popular King could then make a statement like this and no one was critical of his referring to citizens by class distinctions. Even in modern times, Britain is a more class conscious society than America. The response to this appeal was very good, but the First World War developed in such a way that huge manpower resources were needed and the King had to reluctantly assent to a military draft 7 months later.
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.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt is a Danish retired politician who served as the 26th Prime Minister of Denmark from 2011 to 2015, and Leader of the Social Democrats from 2005 to 2015. She is the first woman to hold each post. Following defeat in 2015, she announced that she would step down as both Danish Prime Minister and Social Democratic party leader. Ending her political career in April 2016, she was the chief executive of the NGO Save the Children until June 2019.
