Pete Buttigieg Quotes

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

The biggest potential and actual crises of the 21st century all have a strong, long, slow aspect with a significant lag between cause and effect. We have to train ourselves to be thinking in terms of longer-term results.

We're so used to thinking in the short term, and the minute you speak in more long-term language then you tend to get dismissed as utopian and so on. We have a real problem here in making long-term thinking respectable

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

One of the hardest things in politics is getting a democracy to deal with something now where the payoff is long term or the price of inaction is decades away.

Our commitment should be to leave our environment in better shape than when we found it, our nation's fiscal house in better order, our public infrastructure in better repair, and our people better educated and healthier. To indulge in immediate gratification and exploitation is an insult to previous generations, who sacrificed for us, and thievery from the next generation, who depend on our virtue.

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.

To me, the failure of liberalism - the tradition I come from - was not recognizing there has to be justice across the generations.

The people who control the condition in which we live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years.

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.

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 more politicians in this country were thinking about the next generation instead of the next election, it might be better for the United States and the world.

What we are doing is, rather than living on the interest of our basic biological capital, we're using up our capital, so we're dipping into our capital. We're using up what should be our children's and grandchildren's legacy.

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

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

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.

Too often, our concern for specific individuals today means neglecting crises that will harm countless people in the future.

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

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

If we do not make tough decisions now, future Americans will have to make even tougher ones.

Governance has been at the heart of the work of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations and is a clear focus in its report, 'Now for the Long Term.'

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

In abandoning the understanding that things - services, goods, wars, and houses - have costs, we risk becoming infantilised, incapable of making decisions about government or finance, and perhaps above all about the environment, the wellbeing of the planet upon which we depend and which our children will inherit from us.

We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.

President Obama came to office proclaiming that he aims to solve problems, not hand them on to our children. Most presidents say that sort of thing.