"Ask not what your country can do for you . . . "

I can't believe it.

John F. Kennedy's 1961 call to service is being attributed to Mussolini over at Instapundit, complete with an Italian translation of the Kennedy quotation. For the genesis of the passage, the JFK Library has a page available here.

As further illustration of how unreliable online reference sites can be, the Instapundit post has an added link to a site that attributes the quote to -- Cicero! (though Kennedy's inaugural address has often been described as Ciceronian in style).

ADDENDUM: It won't end! I've now found a page that claims Khalil Gibran as the author; another that attributes it to Juvenal.

PS: And then there's the other question: chiasmus, or antimetabole?

Posted by David on September 6, 2008 10:10 PM