Carl Sagan Quotes

Corporate responsibility extends not only to the customers, the resources and the workers of the present, but also to those of the future.

The need to incorporate longer term time scales into our societal choices is very real—and right in the lap of our generation.

Most people - including business leaders - want a healthy future for their children.

I plant a lot of trees. I am a great believer in planting things for future generations. I loathe the now culture where you just live for today.

If we don't make tough decisions today our children are going to have to make much, much tougher decisions tomorrow.

What about our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren? Do we not want them to live healthy and happy lives?

The only thing that can save us as a species is seeing how we're not thinking about future generations in the way we live.

If you sense a deep human need, then you go back to all the basic science. If there is some missing, then you try to do more basic science and applied science until you get it.

Technological innovations [in public health] that come from basic science have to be transformed from discovery to delivery, and that gap is huge.

Governments, however, must think not only of the present, but of the rights of future generations.

Basic research, performed for curiosity today, will drive the innovations years from now. When qunatum mecahnics was curioisty-driven basic research 80 years ago, no none had any inkling that there would be prectical cosequences of it. However today much more than half of entire gross nationa product was and is dependent on quantum mechanics. Cell phones, computers, and all the things we enjory were innovations that could not have taken place without an understanding of quantum mechanics.

Just as our forefathers saved and invested to build what we, the current generation, are enjoying today, so, too, we must plant trees so that our sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters, can enjoy the shade.

Often, sustainability is discussed only in the context of energy. Energy sustainability is essential - but the word has a much broader meaning. It means long-term thinking about how we manage our businesses, invest in social spending, and plan for the future. This requires vision and leadership, and it requires citizen engagement.

Your evolutionary heuristics come back to the idea of a future roughly similar to what it is now. You give to the community as it is now, to benefit a similar community in the future.

When we look as a society, we've really lost the connection between our actions and the future.

I think about the world that we leave behind for our children.

If people insist on living as if there's no tomorrow, there really won't be one.

We ... must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow.

Let me put it in a rather larger picture framework. Let's go to the longest time frame, the time frame of the life of our sun. As a star, our sun is about halfway through its life cycle. In the long run, we only have a couple of billion more years likely that we can inhabit this planet. By that time, we're going to have to be out of here before our sun dies. Now, I don't think we need to wait that long, and we certainly shouldn't wait that long. At the moment, we are not on a sustainable path.

As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

We seem to have lost the wisdom of the indigenous people, which dictated that in any major decision, the first consideration was 'How will this decision we're making today affect our people in the future? These days, decisions are made based on the bottom line.

In the fullness of time, when it is our turn to give, we must in turn plant gardens that we may never eat the fruit of, which will benefit the generations to come.

For decades we have been living lives of abundance, with little regard for our natural resources or global health. But we are now facing hard choices in our energy policy. Future generations - my children and grandchildren, along with yours - will have to live with the decisions we make today. And so it is time for us to make some tough and - hopefully - smart choices regarding our energy use and production before it is too late.

Just as with other great words, the word environment means different things. You might say that a cave woman twenty thousand years ago sweeping out the cave was improving the environment. Many people improving the environment think only in terms of the air they breathe in their hometown and the water in the aquifer under their hometown. My guess is very few are thinking centuries ahead or thousand of years ahead, but that's what we have to do.

My job, personally, is to do as much as I can to spread the warning that if we're not careful, it will end. The problem is, we don't think beyond our immediate needs.