Barack Obama Quotes

If you don't focus on the future generation, it means you are destroying your country.

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

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

If more politicians in this country were thinking about the next generation instead of the next election, it might be better for the United States and the world.

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.

Thinking in generations also means enabling our young to have a decent standard of living.

We're so used to thinking in the short term, and the minute you speak in more long-term language then you tend to get dismissed as utopian and so on. We have a real problem here in making long-term thinking respectable

Doing right by our seniors isn't just about making the right decisions today - it's about ensuring that every generation of Americans can have a strong and secure future.

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.

In the fullness of time, when it is our turn to give, we must in turn plant gardens that we may never eat the fruit of, which will benefit the generations to come.

What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?

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.

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.'

The lessons of the past should steer us towards ensuring lasting legacies for generations yet to be born.

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.

It is statesmanlike for the administration and Congress to look to our nation's welfare beyond their terms in office.

We shall have to fight the politician who remembers only that the unborn have no votes and that since posterity has done nothing for us we need do nothing for posterity.

…working not for the small pleasures of today but for the future security and improvement of the race.

It's time to put country ahead of party. It's time to put the next generation ahead of the next election.

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

American society was economically ill-run in the 1980s. Our society has been on a consumption binge. If the American people had a town meeting and said, 'What do we care about posterity? Posterity hasn't done anything for us; we're going to whoop it up now,' that is a rational judgment. But nobody ever did that.

Often, sustainability is discussed only in the context of energy. Energy sustainability is essential - but the word has a much broader meaning. It means long-term thinking about how we manage our businesses, invest in social spending, and plan for the future. This requires vision and leadership, and it requires citizen engagement.

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.