From his Inaugural Address, delivered at the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 1961. The exact wording is confirmed in the official text held by the National Archives ↗ and in Kennedy’s own handwritten, signed copy ↗ on White House letterhead.
“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961
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Provenance
The source
Work
Inaugural Address
Speaker
John F. Kennedy
Delivered
January 20, 1961 · U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C.
Drafted with
Theodore ‘Ted’ Sorensen
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
↑ the famous line has a global twin sentence right after it that is almost never quoted
The address ran under fourteen minutes; this antithesis forms its closing charge.
The official text and reading copy are preserved by the U.S. National Archives ↗, which dates the address to January 20, 1961.
Kennedy later wrote the line out by hand and signed it on White House letterhead—an autograph copy documented by the Shapell Manuscript Foundation ↗.
Historians note that near-identical sentiments long predate 1961, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s 1884 Memorial Day address, per the record of the inauguration ↗.
✓Public domain
The line is a work of the U.S. federal government (a presidential address) and is in the public domain in the United States.
Fact-check
Did he steal it?
Kennedy unquestionably spoke these words—but the line has spawned a cottage industry of ‘he lifted it’ claims. The call-to-service antithesis has many ancestors, yet no single earlier text is shown to have been copied.
✕
Sometimes said to be lifted from Kahlil Gibran popular myth
The Lebanese-American poet wrote a similar antithesis in his 1921 Arabic essay The New Era, and a 1965 English translation was deliberately marketed to evoke Kennedy. But researchers conclude the two lines were independently written ↗—Kennedy read no Arabic and the timeline does not support borrowing.
✕
Traced by some to his old school, Choate headmaster George St. John precursor
St. John preached a version of ‘ask not what Choate can do for you…’ in chapel talks the teenage Kennedy heard—itself echoing Harvard dean LeBaron Briggs’s line ‘What can I do for her?’ A plausible influence rather than a text Kennedy quoted, as reported by CBS News ↗.
✕
Anticipated decades earlier by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. precursor
In an 1884 Memorial Day address the future Supreme Court justice urged listeners ‘to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for the country in return,’ per the inauguration record ↗.
✓The exact, world-famous wording is Kennedy’s own—drafted with Ted Sorensen and delivered on January 20, 1961—even though its service-over-self antithesis had echoed through American oratory for generations, as the National Archives text ↗ confirms.
Context
Why it mattered
Kennedy delivered the line at the height of the Cold War—thirteen weeks before the Bay of Pigs and against a backdrop of nuclear tension. Framed as a summons to civic duty over private benefit, it became the rhetorical seed of the Peace Corps, which he established by executive order about six weeks later, on March 1, 1961.
The antithesis—built on the same chiasmus (‘X for you / you for X’) that powers so much memorable oratory—was engineered for quotability, and it worked: it ranks among the most cited sentences ever spoken by a U.S. president.
Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.
On authorship and the Sorensen question
Speechwriter Ted Sorensen, who drafted the address, was long coy about who authored the specific line, insisting only that Kennedy was the ‘principal author’ of his speeches and articles. Sorensen also said he was unaware at the time of the Holmes, Harding, and Gibran parallels—evidence that the formulation was arrived at freshly rather than copied from any one predecessor.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
John F. Kennedy (JFK) was the 35th President of the United States, serving from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963. A Democrat and former senator from Massachusetts, he was the youngest man ever elected to the office, and his New Frontier presidency spanned the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the founding of the Peace Corps, and the early space race. His 1961 inaugural address—drafted with counsel Ted Sorensen—remains one of the most quoted speeches in American history.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source — Chicago
John F. Kennedy, “Inaugural Address,” Washington, D.C., January 20, 1961. Official text, U.S. National Archives, Milestone Documents.
MLA (9th ed.)
Kennedy, John F. “Inaugural Address.” 20 Jan. 1961, U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C. National Archives, www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-john-f-kennedys-inaugural-address.
APA (7th ed.)
Kennedy, J. F. (1961, January 20). Inaugural address [Speech transcript]. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-john-f-kennedys-inaugural-address
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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’?” Last verified 7 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/ask-not-what-your-country-can-do-for-you-ask-what-you-can