John Trumbull Quotes

If you have children, you worry about the world you're leaving them.

We hold the future in our hands, together, we must ensure that our grandchildren will not have to ask why we failed to do the right thing, and let them suffer the consequences.

Interest groups are not the same as individuals. Through false nostalgia for the New Deal, you are taking the younger generation hostage. They are the ones who are going to have to pay far greater taxes. They are the future's forgotten men.

A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future.

Libertarians argue that no normal adult has the right to impose choices on other normal adults, except in abnormal circumstances, such as when one person finds another unconscious and administers medical assistance or calls an ambulance.

Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?

As Members of Congress and people of conscience, we must work to overcome the indifference and distortions of history, and ensure that future generations know what happened.

Hollow commitments to action in the future are insufficient. Deferring difficult issues must not be tolerated. Our children and grandchildren expect us to speak and act decisively.

If conquest does not bind posterity, so neither can compact bind it.

I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.

We must strive to become good ancestors.

We pay for the mistakes of our ancestors, and it seems only fair that they should leave us the money to pay with.

No man ever freely surrendered a portion of his own liberty for the sake of the public good; such a chimera appears only in fiction. If it were possible, we would each prefer that the pacts binding others did not bind us; every man sees himself as the centre of all the world's affairs.

When a man says he is building a house for himself and his posterity, he does not mean to be understood as saying that he has any thought of binding them, nor is it to be inferred that he is so foolish as to imagine that he has any right or power to bind them, to live in it.

America has to ask itself not what it wants, but what it can afford... The New Deal, in my mind, has become a raw deal for my children.

Our choices are going to determine the future for our children, our children's children, and their children. I take that responsibility very seriously.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

I don't care if I die - look, I'm old - but you want your kids to have good times and a good life.

History is merciless. History doesn't care if we pound our society down a rat hole. It's up to us to make more intelligent choices about how we live!

I believe that my choosing my present course I do no dishonor to them, or to those who may come after me.

What we owe future generations is the subject of growing debate by economists, philosophers, ethicists, public policymakers, and academics of all stripes. But for me as a mother, the moral implications are very clear. We owe them clean air and fresh water, a healthy planet and a secure future.

Posterity is the world to come; the world for whom we hold our ideals, from whom we have borrowed our planet, and to whom we bear sacred responsibility. We must do what America does best: offer more opportunity to all and demand responsibility from all.

It is the high privilege and sacred duty of those now living to educate their successors and fit them, by intelligence and virtue, for the inheritance which awaits them.

Remember two things. One is never to forget posterity when devising a policy. The other is never to think of posterity when making a speech.