Quote collection
425 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We can't negotiate the facts. We can't negotiate the truth about the situation. And for those who are too fearful to finish, it can be done and must be done. Make sure we succeed, . . . It is wrong for this generation to destroy the habitability of our planet and ruin the prospects of every future generation."
"A leapord never changes his stripes."
"We're putting 70 million tonnes of pollution into the atmosphere every day, trapping an enormous amount of extra heat from the sun inside the earth's atmosphere. It's threatening to push the planet past a tipping point beyond which climate change would be difficult to stop"
"As important as it is to change the light bulbs, its more important to change the laws"
"The scientists are virtually screaming from the rooftops now. The debate is over! There's no longer any debate in the scientific community about this. But the political systems around the world have held this at arm's length because it's an inconvenient truth, because they don't want to accept that it's a moral imperative."
"It is my deep personal conviction that abortion is wrong. I hope that some day we will see the current outrageously large number of abortions drop sharply...let me assure you that I share youR belief that innocent human life must be protected."
"If we did not take action to solve this crisis, it could indeed threaten the future of human civilization. That sounds shrill. It sounds hard to accept. I believe it's deadly accurate. But again, we can solve it."
"A lot of people go straight from denial to despair without pausing in the middle and doing something about it."
"You need to really scrub your investment portfolios, because I guarantee you, many of you are going to find them chock-full of subprime carbon assets."
"It should be lifted above partisanship because it's a question of survival. It's a moral issue."
"I have a personal staff that helps me scour the internet and other media for the latest scientific peer-reviewed findings, the latest examples of climate-related extreme weather events, and the latest examples of progress. The world is in the midst of a sustainability revolution that has the scope of the industrial revolution, but with the speed of the digital revolution. That's not enough without new laws and the right kind of political leadership. But it does give us a base from which to build a movement that will save us from the most catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis."
"My parents were true believers in the efficacy of American constitutional democracy, and I was thoroughly inculcated with reverence for what we the people are capable of doing. The complication in that simple narrative is that as I got older, the Vietnam War shook my confidence in how our democracy was working. I ended up serving in that war, but it started with a lie, and I was very proud of my father for being one of its earliest opponents."
"I understand that being optimistic in this age is challenging, but I am optimistic nonetheless."
"I remain optimistic that ultimately free speech and a free press where individuals have access to the dialogue will have a self-correcting quality."
"Now we have things that are obviously false, leading us to war, leading us to deny people health care, leading us to ignore the climate crisis. We have to restore the integrity of the democratic conversation."
"I have a sense of mission on this climate crisis, and I'm trying to pour all the energy I have into it. And I hope that I, along with others, can catalyze the emergence of real solutions to the climate crisis. I think we're making a lot of progress. I think we're going to win this, but it matters how quickly we win it. So I'm focused on that."
"Fake news has been around as long as news has been around."
"In the age of the internet, with all of its problems, over time, the very fact that individuals can join the conversation creates the opportunity for the emergence of - for the re-emergence of a genuine conversation of democracy."
"We face a climate crisis now that is the most serious challenge our civilization has ever confronted. And the greatest country in the world [America] has to remain a part of this unprecedented global agreement to deal with it."
"The crisis is a concrete threatening reality today. It stands to get catastrophically worse unless we take action before the accumulation [of] this global warming pollution reaches such toxic levels that the problem becomes bigger than we can solve."