Jonas Salk Quotes

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.

Are we being good ancestors?

I'm really disturbed by the degree to which I don't hear people saying, "Are we leaving the world better than we found it?" I think we are a generation that perhaps could not answer in the affirmative, and it is the evasion of the larger responsibility of being only one generation in what one hopes will be an infinite series of fruitful generations. There is a selfishness in refusing to understand that we are passing through; others will come, and they deserve certain courtesies and certain considerations from us.

We must strive to become good ancestors.

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

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.

Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.

That's our charge as ancestors of unborn generations: to once again become free.

The World is not ours to keep. We hold it in trust for future generations.

One must care about a world one will not see.

Let us be the ancestors our descendants will thank.

Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation.

The world is not given by our fathers but borrowed from our children.

We are too careless of posterity; not considering that as they are, so the next generation will be.

God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath.

What our Seventh Generation will have is a consequence of our actions today.

Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?

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.

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

The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.

Real leadership means tackling tough problems ourselves and not leaving them to our children.

It is up to us to live up to the legacy that was left for us, and to leave a legacy that is worthy of our children and of future generations.

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

Canada is our inheritance from our parents and our legacy to our children.

Everyone archetypally is a parent to future generations.