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Daily Inspiration Quote by Martin Sheen

"We are the generation that brought the bomb in. We have got to be the generation that should take it out"

About this Quote

Guilt becomes a kind of inheritance in Martin Sheen's line: not the abstract guilt of history books, but the lived responsibility of people who watched the nuclear age arrive and then learned to keep going anyway. The phrasing is blunt on purpose. "Brought the bomb in" sounds like someone hauling a dangerous object through the front door, as if the catastrophe were a household decision rather than a sprawling military-industrial machine. That casual verb choice is the point: nuclear weapons persist because they get normalized, folded into budgets, strategy memos, and the background hum of "deterrence."

Sheen also frames the problem as generational, not partisan. "We are the generation" collapses individual differences into a single moral ledger. It's a rhetorical move that trades precision for urgency, and it works because it mirrors how nuclear risk actually functions: one miscalculation can implicate everyone. The second sentence shifts from confession to mandate. "We have got to" is not policy language; it's pressure, the cadence of a vow. "Should take it out" echoes the earlier domestic metaphor, turning disarmament into cleanup - the overdue task after a reckless installation.

Context matters because Sheen isn't a general or a diplomat; he's a public figure whose cultural power is persuasion, not command. That outsider status gives the statement its bite. It's less a technical argument than an ethical confrontation, aimed at an audience conditioned to treat nuclear arsenals as permanent scenery. The subtext is clear: if your generation helped make this normal, you don't get to die before unmaking it.

Quote Details

TopicPeace
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Sheen, Martin. (2026, January 17). We are the generation that brought the bomb in. We have got to be the generation that should take it out. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-are-the-generation-that-brought-the-bomb-in-we-67699/

Chicago Style
Sheen, Martin. "We are the generation that brought the bomb in. We have got to be the generation that should take it out." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-are-the-generation-that-brought-the-bomb-in-we-67699/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We are the generation that brought the bomb in. We have got to be the generation that should take it out." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-are-the-generation-that-brought-the-bomb-in-we-67699/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.

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Martin Sheen (born August 3, 1940) is a Actor from USA.

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