Lester R. Brown Quotes

If you look at the state of our planet, the next generations won't be around if we consider sustainability as a gimmick.

Business is a subset of the environment, not the other way around. You can't have a healthy economy, you can't have a healthy anything in a degraded environment.

We need a completely different type of economy - one which is truly green, sustainable, and embeds the biggest issues of the day into its heart.

I want the cleanest water, the freshest air and wildlife in abundance... but most of all I want a future for our children.

If we allow the destruction of the environment, we can see the terrorists have utterly won, and are destroying the future of our children and grandchildren. We must not let that happen.

We're not locked in to these conditions that degrade the environment, and jeopardize the future of our children.

Children of the future, watching empires fall. Madness the cup they drink from, self destruction the toll.

America is the largest investor in the technologies necessary to be able to say to people, 'You can grow your economy so people's standard of living can improve, and at the same time be good stewards of the environment'.

Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.

Pollution and overuse of resources stem directly from the failure of government to defend private property. If property rights were to be defended adequately, we would find that here, as in other areas of our economy and society, private enterprise and modern technology would come not as a curse to mankind but as its salvation.

I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that's beyond fixing.

The society that destroys its children is eating its own tail, committing suicide in the most perverse way.

Why worry about minor little details like clean air, clean water, safe ports and the safety net when Jesus is going to give the world an "Extreme Makeover: Planet Edition" right after he finishes putting Satan in his place once and for all?

Our whole social order could self-destruct over the obsession with freedom disconnected from responsibility; where choice is imagined to be somehow independent of consequences.

For some time I watch the coming of the night? Above is the glistening galaxy of childhood, now hidden in the Western world by air pollution and the glare of artificial light; for my children's children, the power, peace and healing of the night will be obliterated.

My hope for the planet is my children and grandchildren.

We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.

Pollution should never be the price of prosperity.

Our children may save us if they are taught to care properly for the planet; but if not, it may be back to the Ice Age or the caves from where we first emerged. Then we'll have to view the universe above from a cold, dark place. No more jet skis, nuclear weapons, plastic crap, broken pay phones, drugs, cars, waffle irons, or television. Come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea.

The greatest danger hanging over our children and grandchildren is initiation of changes that will be irreversible on any time scale that humans can imagine.

Sustainability is an economic state where the demands placed upon the environment by people and commerce can be met without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations. It can also be expressed in the simple terms of an economic golden rule for the restorative economy: Leave the world better than you found it, take no more than you need, try not to harm life or the environment, make amends if you do.

Though the word beautification makes the concept sound merely cosmetic, it involves much more: clean water, clean air, clean roadsides, safe waste disposal and preservation of valued old landmarks as well as great parks and wilderness areas. To me … beautification means our total concern for the physical and human quality we pass on to our children and the future.

We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations

We can't negotiate the facts. We can't negotiate the truth about the situation. And for those who are too fearful to finish, it can be done and must be done. Make sure we succeed, . . . It is wrong for this generation to destroy the habitability of our planet and ruin the prospects of every future generation.

Understanding is becoming aware of the fact that civilization itself is in trouble and we have done it by overpopulating the planet, and by moving toward self-service and greed. These sort of things are directly the wrong approach.