Bruce Babbitt Quotes

Humans merely share the earth. We can only protect the land, not own 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.

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

We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed, for our safety, to its security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft.

We firmly believe the environmental issues cannot be addressed without extensive public participation, but people need to be informed before they can get involved.

We owe each other a debt and we owe each other an obligation, and because of these fundamental American imperatives, there are things that we own in common with each other, and that we are obliged to protect for our posterity. The water. The trees. The wild places in the land. We lose sight of these truths sometimes.

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

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.

It's our responsibility to pass on what we inherited, not to squander it, but to build on it.

That sense of sacredness, that thinking in generations, must begin with reverence for this earth.

I maintain that if there is such a thing as a true and honest environmentalist, it's people like Slim and hopefully me, who have been caretakers of the land all our lives, along with the generations before us.

Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart.

What's near and dear to my heart is cooperative conservation.

The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved.

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

Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it..

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.

We need to defend the fruits of our land.

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.

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

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.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation.

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.

If man can take care of man, nature can take care of the rest.