Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I am permitted to hold for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. --George Bernard Shaw

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it. --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Our lives are touched by those who lived centuries ago, and we hope that our lives will mean something to those who will live centuries from now. It's a great 'chain of being,' someone once told me, and I think our job is to hope, to dream and to do the best we can to hold up our small segment of that chain. -- Dorothy Day

For tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today --African Proverb

Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours. --Cesar Chavez

 The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be. --Paul Valery

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

 If you want happiness for a lifetime, help the next generation. --Chinese Proverb

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world. --Thomas Jefferson

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. --Martin Luther King, Jr. 

If the success or failure of this planet, and of human beings, depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be?  What would I do?--R. Buckminster Fuller  

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.   --George Bernard Shaw

Here in the impermanent and yet continuously flowing world, let us stand together for future generations.   --Thich Nhat Hanh

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.   – Jose Ortega y Gasset

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shown, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despootism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

--Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, 1776