Robert Kennedy Quotes

We must all live so that our children do not have to pay for our deeds.

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

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.

Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation in turn becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources - and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on in the future.

We cannot shirk responsibility from concerns for the welfare of the next generation.

We, the present generation, have the responsibility to act as a trustee of the rich natural wealth for the future generations. The issue is not merely about climate change; it is about climate justice.

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

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

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

Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.

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

I beseech you to live not only for this age, but for the next also.

The only legacy I seek is the one that any grandparent seeks - that is, to hand off our nation... our fields and our farms to the next generation in better shape than we found it.

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.

I think my job is to leave some evidence for future generations that there was somebody who cared while we were destroying everything.

What is the future going to say about us now? What are our kids going to look at us and say, 'How could you not stop that person from getting into power? How could you not stop that environmental disaster that you saw coming a mile away?'

We need to have a vision of the world we want to create so that we can see ourselves as collaborators with future generations in the project of shaping it.

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

We are only the trustees for those who come after us.

I'm really disturbed by the degree to which I don't hear people saying, "Are we leaving the world better than we found it?" I think we are a generation that perhaps could not answer in the affirmative, and it is the evasion of the larger responsibility of being only one generation in what one hopes will be an infinite series of fruitful generations. There is a selfishness in refusing to understand that we are passing through; others will come, and they deserve certain courtesies and certain considerations from us.

Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation.

What does our generation owe to generations yet unborn? ...there is an order in the universe which must be respected, and... the human person, endowed with the capability of choosing freely, has a grave responsibility to preserve this order for the well-being of future generations.

President Obama believes that we have a moral obligation to the next generation to leave our land, water, and wildlife better than we found it.

The world is not given by our fathers but borrowed from 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.