Pope Benedict XVI Quotes

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.

Taking care of our families isn't just about putting food on the table today. It's about ensuring that our children and grandchildren will have a habitable world where they can get to know various species of sea turtles.

Conservation of our resources is the fundamental question before this nation, and that our first and greatest task is to set our house in order and begin to live within our means.

We are no longer inheriting the Earth from our parents, we are stealing it from our children.

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.

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

We owe it to each other - and to our children and grandchildren - to leave our planet in a better state than when we found it.

How can we teach our children to be responsible beyond themselves and care for other human beings' welfare and for the welfare of the planet and all that it contains? It's a difficult lesson to convey, when, more than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez disaster, Prince William Sound is still experiencing the damaging effects.

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

The earth always belongs 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.

We gotta leave a better planet for our kids. And I would say we gotta leave better kids for our planet as well.

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.

We have a responsibility to protect the rights of generations, of all species, that cannot speak for themselves today. The global challenge of climate change requires that we ask no less of our leaders, or ourselves.

A sustainable economy represents nothing less than a higher social order one as concerned with future generations as with our own, and more focused on the health of the planet and the poor than on material acquisitions and military might. While it is a fundamentally new endeavor, with many uncertainties, it is far less risky than continuing with business as usual.

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.

Acknowledging the physical realities of our planet does not mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource problems of the world - water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution - if we tackle them with courage and foresight.

We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted...So any nation which in its youth lives only for the day, reaps without sowing, and consumes without husbanding, must expect the penalty of the prodigal whose labor could with difficulty find him the bare means of life.

When we talk about the environment, about creation, my thoughts turn to the first pages of the Bible, the Book of Genesis, which states that God placed man and woman on earth to cultivate and care for it. And the question comes to my mind: What does cultivating and caring for the earth mean? Are we truly cultivating and caring for creation? Or are we exploiting and neglecting it?

I believe in a sound, strong environmental policy that protects the health of our people and a wise stewardship of our nation's natural resources.

Until it's understood to involve justice for those in poverty, a future for generations yet unborn, and a commitment to the rest of creation, it's unlikely we'll be able to overcome the status quo.

To harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

Ever since I had my first child I have been passionate in my commitment to preserve our precious resources for my children and their children's children. This is the obligation of all of us visiting this planet for a limited time.

The future of our children is a trust we have been given. To conserve and grow, not to squander wastefully on needless excesses. The earth is a trust, to protect and to honor. Our home, our livelihood, our future rests in the quality of our stewardship. Let us become better stewards.

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