Thomas Wells Quotes

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

We shall have to fight the politician who remembers only that the unborn have no votes and that since posterity has done nothing for us we need do nothing for posterity.

A politician thinks of the next election; the statesman thinks of the next generation

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.

It is our job, as members of parliament, to legislate with an eye to the long term future, to look over the horizon beyond the next election and ensure that as far as we can what we do today will make Australia a better place, a safer place, for future generations to live in.

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.'

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.

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

I beseech you to live not only for this age, but for the next also.

What Republicans have to get away from is just worrying about the next election and start thinking about what is good for the country down the road.

It's time to put country ahead of party. It's time to put the next generation ahead of the next election.

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

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

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.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

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.

If you don't focus on the future generation, it means you are destroying your country.

If you only get money, but you don't care about a thing, right or wrong, you cannot last. That cannot sustain you for the future.

History is merciless. History doesn't care if we pound our society down a rat hole. It's up to us to make more intelligent choices about how we live!

To make sense of a world in which rapid change and globalisation create genuine insecurity, we need benchmarks by which we can judge our actions and their long-term impact.

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.

When moral principles, rather than persons, are candidates for power, to vote is to perform a moral duty, and not to vote is to neglect a duty

The difference between a politician and a statesman is: a politician thinks of the next election and a statesman thinks of the next generation.

The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.

Those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand the one or the other.