What Future Are You Fighting For?

One of my new teaching props is a collecting quotes about whatever topics we're working on and offering them up to students as springboards. Our research unit this semester is vaguely titled "The Future," so I pulled some various quotes together about it for sharing. The purpose of the unit is to introduce the idea of sustainability and pose the question, "What Future Are You Fighting For?" This, to me, seems the ultimate purpose of education.

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Here are a few. Do you have any to add? Got anyone good ones about societies who fall from greed?

The future was wide open. ― Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. ― Eleanor Roosevelt

[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together. ― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

Don't confuse poor decision-making with destiny. Own your mistakes. It’s ok; we all make them. Learn from them so they can empower you! ― Steve Maraboli

It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals. ― Jonathan Safran Foer

You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. ― Chuck Palahniuk

History is a race between education and catastrophe. ― H. G. Wells

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so. ― Noam Chomsky

When you make a choice, you change the future. ― Deepak Chopra

Love is the only future God offers. ― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. ― Barack Obama

If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely. ― Seth Godin

All depends on the purpose; not even a blade of grass shall be cut without a worthy purpose.  ― Kulārṇava Tantra

The future is not an inheritance, it is an opportunity and an obligation. ― Bill Clinton

Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations. ― Wendell Berry

 We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will. ― Jeffrey D. Sachs

I will not let anyone tell me we must spend more money. This crisis did not come about because we issued too little money but because we created economic growth with too much money and it was not sustainable growth. ― Angela Merkel