Quotes About Our Descendants

#1. Let us be the ancestors our descendants will thank.

Winona LaDuke

#2. for faith and courage are the greatest gift that we can give to our descendants. And the Land holds mysteries of which we know nothing mysteries of hope as well as of peril.

Stephen R. Donaldson

#3. Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future.

Arthur C. Clarke

#4. Our brains are continuing to evolve, and perhaps a few tens of thousands of years from now, our descendants will walk around with five pound brains, allowing them insights that we can't imagine.

Seth Shostak

#5. One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.

Franklin A. Thomas

#6. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the study of so vast a subject. A time will come when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them.

Seneca The Younger

#7. Imagine our descendants in the year 2200 or 2500. They might liken us to aliens who have treated the Earth as if it were a mere stopover for refueling, or even worse, characterize us as barbarians who would ransack their own home.

Paul J. Crutzen

#8. Our instinctive apparatus consists of two parts- the one tending to further our own life and that of our descendants, the other tending to thwart the lives of supposed rivals.

Bertrand Russell

#9. No greater mischief can happen to a Christian people, than to have God's word taken from them, or falsified, so that they no longer have it pure and clear. God grant we and our descendants be not witness to such a calamity.

Martin Luther

#10. While we may never achieve closure in our view of the world, it seems extraordinarily likely that our descendants will look upon many of our beliefs as both impossibly quaint and suicidally stupid.

Sam Harris

#11. We go to great pains to alter life for the happiness of our descendants and our descendants will say as usual: things used to be so much better, life today is worse than it used to be.

Anton Chekhov

#12. Children are the inheritance of the Lord to us in this life and also in eternity. Eternal life is not only to have forever our descendants from this life. It is also to have eternal increase.

Henry B. Eyring

#13. Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.

Theodore Roosevelt

#14. Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

Greg Egan

#15. America is not nearly done. We're only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows ... what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants - if they survive that long - will see.

Alice Walker

#16. A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?

Carl Sagan

#17. Perhaps most ridiculous of all is the suggestion that we 'keep' our radioactive garbage for the use of our descendants. This 'solution', I think, requires an immediate poll of the next 20,000 generations.

David R. Brower

#18. If we drive our fellow species to extinction, we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world we inherited from our elders.

James Hansen

#19. There can be no doubt that our descendants will learn to exploit the energy of fusion for peaceful purposes even before its use becomes necessary for the preservation of human civilization.

Lev Artsimovich

#20. I see now our fireside formed into a groupe, no one member of which has a fibre in their composition which can ever produce any jarring or jealousies among us. No irregular passions, no dangerous bias, which may render problematical the future fortunes and happiness of our descendants.

Thomas Jefferson

#21. If we must die, then let us die fighting a battle worthy of remembrance in the tales of our descendants!

Daniel Adorno

#22. There's no really rosy scenario ahead, where climate change just doesn't happen, but I believe we don't have the ethical right to throw our hands up in the air and say, 'Game over.' Whatever pathway we choose, our descendants will be dealing with that reality for centuries to come.

Alex Steffen

#23. If you do not exclude them, in less than 200 years our descendants will be working in the fields to furnish them substance, while they will be in the counting houses rubbing their hands. I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude Jews for all time, your children will curse you in your graves.

Benjamin Franklin

#24. Star Trek's genial premise is that the cosmos is flush with intelligent species, and our descendants will interact with them face-to-face, thanks to warp drive and some winsome space cadets.

Seth Shostak

#25. If our current barbaric world spirals into greater corruption and brutality, our descendants may become so cruel and so morally perverse that they cross time to watch us suffer, bearing orgasmic witness to the bloodbaths from which their sick civilization grew.

Dean Koontz

#26. There will he nothing more that posterity can add to our immoral habits; our descendants must have the same desires and act the same follies as their sires. Every vice has reached its zenith.

Juvenal

#27. We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.

Sam Harris

#28. We now think it hilarious that medieval streets were used as open sewers. Equally, our descendants will say: 'You won't believe this, but people were once allowed to hurl a couple of tons of dangerous metal around smashing into each other.'

Norman Foster

#29. Thackeray and Balzac will make it possible for our descendants to live over again the England and France of to-day. Seen in this light, the novelist has a higher office than merely and amuse his contemporaries.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton

#30. Mother Earth needs us to keep our covenant. We will do this in courts, we will do this on our radio station, and we will commit to our descendants to work hard to protect this land and water for them. Whether you have feet, wings, fins, or roots, we are all in it together.

Winona LaDuke

#31. We will know which stars to visit. Our descendants will then skim the light years, the children of Thales and Aristarchus, Leonardo and Einstein.

Carl Sagan

#32. If humans escape the solar system and outlive the Sun, our descendants may someday live on one of these planets. Atoms from Times Square, cycled through the heart of the Sun, will form our new bodies. One day, either we will all be dead, or we will all be New Yorkers.

Randall Munroe

#33. I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences.

David Pearce

#34. In religion as in parenthood, uncritical loyalty to our ancestors may implicate us in an injustice against our descendants: imprisoning them in the errors of our ancestors.

Brian D. McLaren

#35. For most of human history people owned other people. Then, only a hundred and fifty years ago, our ancestors figured out that was a bad idea. One day we'll figure out, or our descendants will figure out, that people owning land they don't live on or work is a bad idea too.

Dennis Vickers

#36. The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.

E. O. Wilson

#37. We should not forget that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time as it is to us to be prosperous in our time.

Edmund Morris

#38. I'm really convinced that our descendants a century or two from now will look back at us with the same pity that we have toward the people in the field of science two centuries ago.

John Templeton

#39. Men lived among mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized that they were poetical; it may reasonably be inferred that some of our descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-posts as old and natural as the trees.

G.K. Chesterton

#40. If the day comes when our descendants can venture with wonder into chestnut forests, we will have gained back more than a perfect tree. We will have gained a new reason for hope.

Susan Freinkel

#41. Projects undreamed of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants, comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache and their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.

Winston S. Churchill

#42. Jesus did not become the 'GodKlingon' or the 'GodMartian'! Only descendants of Adam can be saved. God's Son remains the 'Godman' as our Savior.

Ken Ham

#43. Now comes the second machine age. Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power-the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments-what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power.

Erik Brynjolfsson

#44. For our part, we shall continue to work for the new dawn when all the Children of Abraham and their descendants are living together in the birthplace of their three great monotheistic religions, a life free from fear, a life free from want - a life in peace.

King Hussein I

#45. We examine and highlight the history of the African descendants in America, and know that each and every one of us has come this far because of our faith in this country.

Yvette Clarke

#46. Whereas our ancestors (not of choice) were the first successful cultivators of the wilds of America, we their descendants feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil.

Richard Allen

#47. All of our people all over the country-except the pure-blooded Indians-are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, including even those who came over here on the Mayflower.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#48. In the dimension of space and time,
We chew as rhythmically as we breathe.
Maintaining the lives of all our ancestors,
Opening an upward path for descendants.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#49. Our ancestors were very rich and eminent people, and they left us an enormous inheritance, which we have completely forgotten, especially since the time when we began to consider ourselves the descendants of a monkey.

P.D. Ouspensky

#50. Ritual affirms the common patterns, the values, the shared joys, risks, sorrows, and changes that bind a community together. Ritual links together our ancestors and descendants, those who went before with those will come after us.

Starhawk

#51. I don't know exactly why the notion of homeownership has such a grasp on the American imagination. Perhaps as descendants of landless immigrants we turn our plots into symbols of stability.

Ellen Goodman

#52. Our ancestors sought knowledge, but we, their descendants, glorify ignorance.

S.J. Kincaid

#53. But whatever, we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes but at least we have rage and we will build empires with that, gentlemen.

Miriam Toews

#54. It is said that the quality of recent immigration is undesirable. The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens.

Grover Cleveland