The Price Of Greatness Is Responsibility

Churchill delivered this line at Harvard University on 6 September 1943, while accepting an honorary degree after the Quebec Conference, where he and Franklin D. Roosevelt had planned the Allied invasion of Italy. The speech was broadcast on several American radio networks and the BBC. Its central theme was a direct challenge to American isolationism: a nation of such greatness, Churchill argued, could not remain "undisturbed beyond their protective oceans" as those oceans shrank. The speech also contained another memorable phrase: "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."