Marian Wright Edelman Quotes

I'm just becoming more and more aware of this truly profound responsibility that we carry as individuals. And it's a responsibility not only to ourselves and to our families, but to the billions of people who still have to come in the future who will be dealing with our legacy.

I haven't inherited the earth from my parents, I am borrowing it from my children.

Land is not something you inherit from your parents. It is something you borrow from your children.

Are we being good ancestors?

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

We must strive to become good ancestors.

We owe at least this much to future generations, from whom we have borrowed a fragile planet called Earth.

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.

The most important question we must ask ourselves is, 'Are we being good ancestors?'

Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity.

One must care about a world one will not see.

Look at a child and realize that their future is in your hands. It's not just those who will be here fifty years from now. The decisions we make in the next ten years will shape the next 10,000 years.

I believe that success brings responsibility. It also does not bring immunity to the consequences of our quickening march towards oblivion. The bottom line is that all of us should be invovled in our own futures to create a world that our children will want to live in.

The future of our children is a trust we have been given. To conserve and grow, not to squander wastefully on needless excesses. The earth is a trust, to protect and to honor. Our home, our livelihood, our future rests in the quality of our stewardship. Let us become better stewards.

I would like to ask all those who have positions of responsibility in economic, political and social life, and all men and women of goodwill: let us be 'protectors' of creation, protectors of God's plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment.

The moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable...that what we take for granted may not be here for our children

We have an obligation to live in harmony with creation, with our capital... with God's creation. And we need to administer and work that very carefully.

Humans merely share the earth. We can only protect the land, not own it.

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

It's our responsibility to pass on what we inherited, not to squander it, but to build on it.

That sense of sacredness, that thinking in generations, must begin with reverence for this earth.

Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.

I gone on for years about the importance of thinking about the long term in relation to the environmental damage, climate change, and everything else because we don’t want to hand on an increasingly dysfunctional world to our grandchildren and I do not want to be confronted by my future grandchild saying, “Well why didn’t you do something?”

When you run a company, you want to hand it off in better shape than you found it. In the same way, just as we shouldn't leave our children or grandchildren with mountains of national debt and unsustainable entitlement programs, we shouldn't leave them with the economic and environmental costs of climate change.

Every generation inherits a world it never made; and, as it does so, it automatically becomes the trustee of that world for those who come after. In due course, each generation makes its own accounting to its children.