Thomas Jefferson Quotes

The earth always belongs to the living.

The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.

The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it.

Can one generation bind another and all others in succession forever? I think not. The Creator has made the earth for the living, not the dead.

It is often said that the earth belongs to the race, as if raw land was a boon, or gift.

We are here, on earth. Not one of us has any right to the earth.

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.

All the earth is mine, and I have a right to go all over it and through it.

Each generation has its own rendezvous with the land, for despite our fee titles and claims of ownership, we are all brief tenants on this planet. By choice, or by default, we will carve out a land legacy for our heirs.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.

The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air—it is a right proclaimed by their very existence.

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

The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of man change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.

We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living.

Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us to restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wildlife and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.

The fact that God gave the whole human race the earth to use and enjoy cannot indeed in any manner serve as an objection against private possessions.

Property is proper to man.

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

Our ethical values point one way, towards intergenerational responsibility, but our political system points another, towards the short-term horizon of the next election. We should consider introducing agents who can vote in a far-seeing and impartial way.

Rather than rewarding today’s voters with benefits financed by future generations, as Congress typically does, solving the climate problem will require costly actions now to protect those who will follow us.

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.

All too often, the conversation about appropriate and balanced environmental stewardship gets caught up in partisan politics. Yet, this conversation is key to the preservation of our great country for generations to come, as important as ensuring we have fiscally responsible policies to secure our future.

There can be no debate that we possess a collective moral responsibility to leave a better world for our children rather than a devastated planet stripped of its resources.

The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations