Elise Boulding Quotes

The need to incorporate longer term time scales into our societal choices is very real—and right in the lap of our generation.

Our ethical values point one way, towards intergenerational responsibility, but our political system points another, towards the short-term horizon of the next election. We should consider introducing agents who can vote in a far-seeing and impartial way.

Neither man nor nation can prosper unless, in dealing with the present, thought is steadily taken for the future.

There is only one conflict, and that’s between short-term and long-term thinking.

I think three-to-five years ahead minimum. I have a short-term plan, a five-year plan and a decade plan.

Governance has been at the heart of the work of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations and is a clear focus in its report, 'Now for the Long Term.'

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.

We can do things the cheap way, the simple way, for the short-term and without regard for the future. Or, we can make the extra effort, do the hard work, absorb the criticism and make decisions that will cause a better future.

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

The biggest potential and actual crises of the 21st century all have a strong, long, slow aspect with a significant lag between cause and effect. We have to train ourselves to be thinking in terms of longer-term results.

We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.

The people who control the condition in which we live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years.

In order to have your short term policies accepted, you have to have your long term policies understood.

In a scheme of policy which is devised for a nation, we should not limit our views to the operation during a single year, or even a short term of years. We should look at its operation for a considerable time.

Governments, however, must think not only of the present, but of the rights of future generations.

One of the hardest things in politics is getting a democracy to deal with something now where the payoff is long term or the price of inaction is decades away.

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.

I think long-term, not short-term.

When Dad made a decision, whether it was about family or his own career, the majority of the time, it was for the long term, not the short term.

Your evolutionary heuristics come back to the idea of a future roughly similar to what it is now. You give to the community as it is now, to benefit a similar community in the future.

I understand that fans think short-term, and there's nothing wrong with that. You live or you die in the short term. But I believe in our system, and when you do that, you don't make knee-jerk decisions.

I think a lot about intergenerational justice. Short-term versus long-term helps to explain a lot of the policy disagreements that happen between the parties, and I would argue that in most ways, we are the party with more long-term thinking.

I plant a lot of trees. I am a great believer in planting things for future generations. I loathe the now culture where you just live for today.

Corporate responsibility extends not only to the customers, the resources and the workers of the present, but also to those of the future.

One of the primary reasons why the human brain has evolved to look so far into the future is so that we can take actions in the present that will bring us to a better future rather than a worse one.