Jaan Tallinn Quotes

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.

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

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

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

When we look as a society, we've really lost the connection between our actions and the future.

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.

I'm just becoming more and more aware of this truly profound responsibility that we carry as individuals. And it's a responsibility not only to ourselves and to our families, but to the billions of people who still have to come in the future who will be dealing with our legacy.

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

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.

What would help us preserve our natural resources are genetic traits that let us sacrifice the present for the sake of the future. You need wisdom to sacrifice something that is immediately useful or advantageous for the sake of something that will be important in the future.

Just as our forefathers saved and invested to build what we, the current generation, are enjoying today, so, too, we must plant trees so that our sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters, can enjoy the shade.

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.

Sustainability is a part of our 'rise' philosophy. You cannot rise if you take more from the community than you put back.

Growing up Marley, we wanted anything we put our hands on to be beneficial to the environment and the community.

We ... must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow.

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.

The most important question we have to deal with is a combination of population control and the control of our environment - how to utilize the world in as effective a way as we can for the future of mankind.

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

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.

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

I think we need to take responsibility for the things we put on this planet, and also take responsibility for the things we take off the planet. We need to have limiters on how far we allow ourselves to go - ethical, moral limiters.

Future generations are not going to ask us what political party were you in. They are going to ask what did you do about it, when you knew the glaciers were melting.