Alberto Moravia Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations.

Every generation inherits a world it never made; and, as it does so, it automatically becomes the trustee of that world for those who come after. In due course, each generation makes its own accounting to its children.

We, the present generation, have the responsibility to act as a trustee of the rich natural wealth for the future generations. The issue is not merely about climate change; it is about climate justice.

Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.

One of the things I would love for people to think about is social responsibility. If you are fortunate enough to be someone who owns land, I think you ought to be making the most efficient use of that land possible.

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

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 earth always belongs to the living.

The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.

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.

When you run a company, you want to hand it off in better shape than you found it. In the same way, just as we shouldn't leave our children or grandchildren with mountains of national debt and unsustainable entitlement programs, we shouldn't leave them with the economic and environmental costs of climate change.

We must shift our thinking away from short-term gain toward long-term investment and sustainability, and always have the next generations in mind with every decision we make.

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.

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.

If we pass on an unsustainable environment to our children we have failed them.

In fact, quantitative findings of any material and energy changes preserve their full context only through their being seen and understood as parts of a natural order.

The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.

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.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

As a culture or a civilisation, we are a bit juvenile; it's like 'Oh, I have all this power, whoa, this is so cool, I can transform the earth and I can produce all this wealth. But we're blinded by our success in a naive way. There's more to life, actually, and I think the sustainability issue is also helpful in reminding us about that.

There is no single theory that is used in economics that considers the finite nature of resources. It's shocking.