Most people measure their relationship with a country, a company or a team by what it gives them back. John F. Kennedy asked an entire nation to flip that measurement around. "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," he said in his 1961 inaugural address, turning citizenship from something received into something owed. It became the single most repeated line of his presidency, quoted so often that its exact wording is more familiar to most people today than almost anything else he said in office. The idea itself was not new. Versions of the same sentiment had circulated in speeches and sermons for years before Kennedy ever stood at the podium. What made this version different was how tightly it was built, a mirror-image sentence, brief enough to remember after hearing it only once.
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