Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Surveillance technologies now available - including the monitoring of virtually all digital information - have advanced to the point where much of the essential apparatus of a police state is already in place.
I was honored to serve as an elected official for twenty-four years of my life. But right now, I believe our democratic processes have been hacked. They are not serving the best interests of the American public.
The consensus is clear. We need an immediate and determined shift to a clean, renewable economy. The continued mass burning of fossil fuels is inconsistent with a healthy, prosperous future for our civilization.
Any child born into the hugely consumptionist way of life so common in the industrial world will have an impact that is, on average, many times more destructive than that of a child born in the developing world.
Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving: most of the scientists I spoke with assume we'll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade.
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.
We can believe in the future and work to achieve it and preserve it, or we can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children to inherit our legacy. The choice is ours; the earth is in balance.
Researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School have told us that the entire Arctic ice cap may totally disappear in summer in as little as five years if nothing is done to curb emissions of greenhouse gas pollution.
And just as the false assumption that we are not connected to the earth has led to the ecological crisis, so to the equally false assumption that we arenot connected to each other that has led to our social crisis.
Distributed intelligence is the key to the advancement of human civilization. Dictatorships, communist countries, monarchies in the past all eventually collapsed because of their inefficiency in moving information.
The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is with ourselves. We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as allies.
As I have said for many years throughout this land, we're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change.
We have arrived at a moment of decision. Our home - Earth - is in grave danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, of course, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.
Judge Roberts is a brilliant lawyer, a brilliant judge. He is a very careful judge, a thoughtful judge. I would agree with what the President said earlier. He is a decent man. I think everybody who knows him likes him.
We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth.
The good news is, we have everything we need now to respond to the challenge of global warming. We have all the technologies we need, more are being developed.... But we should not wait, we cannot wait, we must not wait.
I think that asserting that former President Obama wasn't born in the United States was just the height of irresponsibility, of course. And Donald Trump corrected that one. There are others that have yet to be corrected.
The signs that the world is spinning out of kilter are increasingly difficult to misinterpret. The question is how to convince enough people to join a critical mass of urgent opinion, in the U.S. and the rest of the world.
The very first words that we, the American nation, spoke were right here in Philadelphia. You know those words: "We the people." It wasn't, "We the conglomerates." It wasn't, "We the corporations." It was, "We the people."
What's really important is how our country gets through Trump period, because nothing's getting done in Washington. Every day it's another set of tweets and another set of controversies. And they're not getting anything done.
Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.
The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, `Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it's not a problem.'... You take action.
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.
It's an important point, and every little bit helps not least because those who make those kinds of changes are more likely to make their voices heard as citizens. But the ultimate solutions are going to come through policies.
Many of the green places and open spaces that need protecting most today are in our own neighborhoods. In too many places, the beauty of local vistas has been degraded by decades of ill-planned and ill-coordinated development.
Clouds of a different sort signal an environmental holocaust without precedent. Once again, world leaders waffle, hoping the danger will dissipate. Yet today the evidence is as clear as the sounds of glass shattering in Berlin.
Unless we stop dumping 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours, which we are doing right now ... the continued acceleration of this pollution would destroy the future of human civilization.
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.
I drive a hybrid. Tipper and I got a Lexus hybrid. And we have a couple of Priuses in the family with our children. And I encourage people to make environmentally conscious choices because we all have to solve this climate crisis.
Science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of creating a permanent 'carbon summer'.
...2009 saw the eighth 'ten-year flood' of Fargo, North Dakota, since 1989. In Iowa, Cedar Rapids was hit last year by a flood that exceeded the 500-year flood plain. All-time flood records are being broken in areas throughout the world.
For me, the most serious problem is how America became so vulnerable to the assertion of blatant falsehoods that drive policy and are not corrected by the so-called immune system of democracy, a free press and a free democratic discourse.
Take it from me - every vote counts. In our Democracy, every vote has power. And never forget - that power is yours. Don't let anyone take it away or talk you into throwing it away. And let's make sure that this time every vote is counted.
Scientists with access to data from Navy submarines traversing underneath the North polar ice cap have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months.
We've seen the bankruptcy of many newspapers. We've seen a further erosion of the line between news and entertainment. But I do believe that there is reason to hope that over time we will see the higher-quality journalism rise to the surface.
We Americans write our own history. And the chapters of which we're proudest are the ones where we had the courage to change. Time and again, Americans have seen the need for change, and have taken the initiative to bring that change to life.
...it is appropriate to have an over representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.
I did very extensive diligence on Al Jazeera English, the network from which Al Jazeera America is going to be derived, and it's really very clear that they have long since established a reputation for excellence and integrity and objectivity.
We are in an unusual predicament as a global civilization. The maximum that is politically feasible, even the maximum that is politically imaginable right now, still falls short of the minimum that is scientifically and ecologically necessary.
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.
When you talk about President Trump, the cable networks turned over so many hours of prime time to him. Why? Because he was entertaining, but also because it drove ratings. And that is different from what the news media is supposed to focus on.
The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives, and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.
The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives - and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.
Incredibly, while these 18 to 20 year-olds cannot legally buy a beer, cannot purchase a bottle of wine and cannot order a drink in a bar, right now they can walk into any gun shop, any pawn shop, any gun show, anywhere in America and buy a handgun.
I affirm my faith when I'm asked about it. But I always try to do so in a way that communicates absolute respect, not only for people who worship in a different way, but just as much respect for those who do not believe in God and who are atheists.
It seems an easy choice - sacrifice the tree for a human life - until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated. Suddenly we must confront some tough questions. How important are the medical needs of future generations?
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.
Fifteen per cent of the population believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona and somewhat fewer still believe the Earth is flat. I think they all get together with the global warming deniers on a Saturday night and party
The Founders of the U.S. gave the senators a term of office three times longer than that of a representative precisely to encourage a reflective frame of mind, a distance from the passions of the voters, and a capacity for deliberative consideration.
Our civilization is experiencing unprecedented changes across many realms, largely due to the rapid advancement of information technology. The ability to code and understand the power of computing is crucial to success in today's hyper-connected world.