Ban Ki-moon Quotes

There's no really rosy scenario ahead, where climate change just doesn't happen, but I believe we don't have the ethical right to throw our hands up in the air and say, 'Game over.' Whatever pathway we choose, our descendants will be dealing with that reality for centuries to come.

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!

I gone on for years about the importance of thinking about the long term in relation to the environmental damage, climate change, and everything else because we don’t want to hand on an increasingly dysfunctional world to our grandchildren and I do not want to be confronted by my future grandchild saying, “Well why didn’t you do something?”

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 don't, in a sensible world, want to hand on an increasingly dysfunctional world to our grandchildren.

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.

I think my message to the politicians who have within their power the ability to make change is, 'Do you really, really not care about the future of your great-grandchildren? Because if we let the world continue to be destroyed the way we are now, what's the world going to be like for your great-grandchildren?'

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

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

A sustainable world means working together to create prosperity for all.

For too long, humanity has acted with an outrageous lack of responsibility. We wanted everything for ourselves: greed, really. We failed to look at the overall picture and did not take into consideration those with whom we share the world.

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.

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

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.

What we owe future generations is the subject of growing debate by economists, philosophers, ethicists, public policymakers, and academics of all stripes. But for me as a mother, the moral implications are very clear. We owe them clean air and fresh water, a healthy planet and a secure future.

In a situation where many national leaders do the same thing and look out for national interests, and with an issue like global warming, you're likely to get no solution, so I think you have to have some kind of ethical trump on some of those issues.

We must give everyone a stake in the World’s environment.

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.

Anybody who doesn't see the impact of climate change is really, I would say, myopic. They don't see the reality. It's so evident that we are destroying Mother Earth. This is not the problem of one country or a few countries: it is the problem of mankind. We need to work together to stop this. Otherwise, our future generations will simply disappear.

We - the current generation - have a moral responsibility to make the world better for future generations.

Our world faces difficult challenges, but no more so than in the past. Working together in a constructive spirit, we can assure our children the future they deserve.

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.

If you have children, you worry about the world you're leaving them.

We cannot shirk responsibility from concerns for the welfare of the next generation.

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