Oskar Kokoschka Quotes

We are a continuum. Just as we reach back to our ancestors for our fundamental values, so we, as guardians of that legacy, must reach ahead to our children and their children. And we do so with a sense of sacredness in that reaching.

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

Why we should put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?

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.

Take care how you place your moccasins upon the Earth, step with care, for the faces of the future generations are looking up from the Earth waiting their turn for life.

We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.

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.

My work to me is more like what the Native Americans say: When we walk upon the earth, we always place our feet very carefully upon the ground, because we know the faces of our future generations are looking up at us from below, and we never forget them. I think as a culture today we've forgotten them. This work is a way to help us remember them. It's a way for us not only to find meaning in our individual lives, but to extend that approach all across the planet. Because if we don't, we won't have a planet.

The World is not ours to keep. We hold it in trust for future generations.

Our connection to nature grounds us, it makes us more spiritually aware. We must keep the legacy of nature materially alive for future generations.

Ever since I had my first child I have been passionate in my commitment to preserve our precious resources for my children and their children's children. This is the obligation of all of us visiting this planet for a limited time.

Let us be the ancestors our descendants will thank.

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.

It is an old cliche to say that the future is in the hands of the young. This is no longer true. The quality of life to be enjoyed or the existence to be survived by our children and future generations is in our hands now.

As a Green, my goal is to put a smile on the face of the coming generations.

What our Seventh Generation will have is a consequence of our actions today.

We cannot tire or give up. We owe it to the present and future generations of all species to rise up and walk!

A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays-when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?

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.

There are generations yet unborn, whose very lives will be shifted and shaped by the moves you make and the actions you take.

That's our charge as ancestors of unborn generations: to once again become free.

I came to this office to solve problems, and not pass them on to future Presidents and future generations.

Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter.

The environment is God's gift to everyone, and in our use of it we have a responsibility towards the poor, towards future generations, and towards humanity as a whole.

Each generation is responsible to make the future of the next.