“A great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation. I think this affected many of the scientists in a subtle sense, and it diminished their desire to continue to work on the bomb.”

"President Truman Did Not Understand" in U.S. News & World Report (15 August 1960)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation. I think this a…" by Leó Szilárd?
Leó Szilárd photo
Leó Szilárd 17
Physicist and biologist 1898–1964

Related quotes

Chinua Achebe photo

“There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.”

Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic

Source: There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

Wilhelm Liebknecht photo
John F. Kennedy photo

“Of the many special obligations incumbent upon an educated citizen, I would cite three as outstanding: your obligation to the pursuit of learning, your obligation to serve the public, your obligation to uphold the law.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Address at Vanderbilt University
Context: You have responsibilities, in short, to use your talents for the benefit of the society which helped develop those talents. You must decide, as Goethe put it, whether you will be an anvil or a hammer, whether you will give to the world in which you were reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of that education. Of the many special obligations incumbent upon an educated citizen, I would cite three as outstanding: your obligation to the pursuit of learning, your obligation to serve the public, your obligation to uphold the law.

Amitabh Bachchan photo
John F. Kennedy photo

“But life is never easy. There is work to be done and obligations to be met — obligations to truth, to justice, and to liberty.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Address at the Free University of Berlin

Barack Obama photo

“Citizenship demands a sense of common purpose; participation in the hard work of self-government; an obligation to serve to our communities.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Sixth State of the Union Address (January 2014)

Mark Twain photo
Samuel Beckett photo

“The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”

Also quoted in "Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde by Charles Juliet" by Nicholas Lezard, in The Guardian (23 January 2010) http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/23/conversations-samuel-beckett-van-velde
Three Dialogues (1949)

Calvin Coolidge photo
John McCain photo

Related topics