Francis Schaeffer Quotes

Ask any parent what we want for our children, and invariably we say 'a better life.' To that end, we give our time, our sleep, our money, and our dreams, much as our parents did before us. We all want a better life for our children. But what we want for them ceases to matter if we leave them an unlivable world.

Respect Mother Earth and her giving ways or trade away our children's days.

The future of our children is a trust we have been given. To conserve and grow, not to squander wastefully on needless excesses. The earth is a trust, to protect and to honor. Our home, our livelihood, our future rests in the quality of our stewardship. Let us become better stewards.

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

Act so that the effects of your actions are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.

We must subject the machine—technology—to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.

Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.

I don’t know how to save the world. I don’t have the answers or The Answer. I hold no secret knowledge as to how to fix the mistakes of generations past and present. I only know that without compassion and respect for all of Earth’s inhabitants, none of us will survive—nor will we deserve to.

We don't have to be that greedy generation that just continued to take down the underpinnings of what makes the planet work in our favor.

When man continues to destroy nature, he saws the very branch on which he sits since the rational protection of nature is at the same time the protection of mankind

We are no longer inheriting the Earth from our parents, we are stealing it from our children.

We have an obligation to live in harmony with creation, with our capital... with God's creation. And we need to administer and work that very carefully.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

I see the entire world as Eden, and every time you take an inch of it away, you must do so with respect.

At every turn, when humanity is asked the question, 'Do you want temporary economic gain or long-term environmental loss, which one do you prefer,' we invariably choose the money.

Mostly, I spend my time being a mother to my two children, working in my organic garden, raising masses of sweet peas, being passionately involved in conservation, recycling and solar energy.

If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.

In time, we will have to recognise that it is not 'nature' that we need to protect, but ourselves, and we can only do this by abandoning the old, grandiose, profit-seeking schemes so beloved of our masters and learning to till the soil, live to scale, and live within our means.

We have to understand in value what the services of nature are so that we can understand that degrading them is an irreplaceable resource that no amount of money or human ingenuity can replace.

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.

If, in our haste to 'progress,' the economics of ecology are disregarded by citizens and policy makers alike, the result will be an ugly America. We cannot afford an America where expedience tramples upon esthetics and development decisions are made with an eye only on the present.

The problem is, we live in a society where all that interests us is power and money. So we don't have any interest in our children, and what we leave for our children is not important.

The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.

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.