Edgar Mitchell Quotes

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

Often, sustainability is discussed only in the context of energy. Energy sustainability is essential - but the word has a much broader meaning. It means long-term thinking about how we manage our businesses, invest in social spending, and plan for the future. This requires vision and leadership, and it requires citizen engagement.

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.

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

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

Our government is concerned about the future. Everything we do today is not aimed at tomorrow but rather at a future that preserves the living conditions of Brazilians.

If we can clean up our world, I'll bet you we can achieve warp drive.

We can do things the cheap way, the simple way, for the short-term and without regard for the future. Or, we can make the extra effort, do the hard work, absorb the criticism and make decisions that will cause a better future.

The passage of time is likely to make high-speed rail more and more desirable, making it critical that politicians of today think ahead to tomorrow.

I'm not in favor of just taking short-term isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is today.

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.

In the long term, it is desirable that the human race, faced with the prospect of extinction on Earth, should prepare an escape route for itself to another inhabitable planet.

The problem of a rising population destroying more than four tons of soil for every human already alive needs to find its way into corporate board rooms if we are to enjoy future financial, economic and political stability.

The problem with a purely collective system is not only that it requires economic growth, and the right sort of demographic trends, but that it prevents people thinking about their futures in a responsible way.

We have to have a way of dealing with this that engenders confidence, trust, gives us every chance of getting the right outcome and boosts both sustainability and economic return at the same time.

What would help us preserve our natural resources are genetic traits that let us sacrifice the present for the sake of the future. You need wisdom to sacrifice something that is immediately useful or advantageous for the sake of something that will be important in the future.

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

NASA should start thinking about this planet.

Neither man nor nation can prosper unless, in dealing with the present, thought is steadily taken for the future.

Sustainability is a very tough thing in our government because there are so many different competing priorities.

The environment is more than just nature. The environment is peoples needs.

If you develop in the old fashioned way there are enormous costs (to the environment)….but we have to demonstrate it, not just tell people.

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

The world must now either accept long-term chaos for the sake of short term comforts or make short term sacrifices for the sake of long term comforts.