Al Gore

There's lots about politics I don't feel comfortable with. To talk about the politics of future ideas is impossible in soundbite form.

We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the 11th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.

In a time of darkness, you don't curse the darkness, you light a candle.

I do genuinely believe that the political system is not linear. When it reaches a tipping point fashioned by a critical mass of opinion, the slow pace of change we're used to will no longer be the norm. I see a lot of signs every day that we're moving closer and closer to that tipping point.

Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination.

In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?

There are many who would much prefer that the word 'climate' never be mentioned and that the issue be eliminated from our national conversation.

I take no pleasure in the fact that the scientific predictions I’ve relayed to popular audiences turn out to be true.

In a free society, there comes a time when the truth - however hard it may be to hear, however impolitic it may seem to say - must be told.

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.

There's no such thing as clean coal. It's non-existent. Theoretically, it might be possible, many years from now, to come up with a way to clean it as it's burnt. But there's not a single demonstration project in the United States. [...] Clean coal doesn't exist.

The catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented - and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.

A day will come when our children and grandchildren will look back and they'll ask one of two questions. Either they will ask: "what in God's name were they doing?" or they may look back and say: "how did they find the uncommon moral courage to rise above politics and redeem the promise of American democracy?"

Speaking from my own religious tradition in this Christmas season, 2,000 years ago a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child in a manger because the inn was full.

Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making.

There was never any doubt in our minds that men and women were equal, if not more so.

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.

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.

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 moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable...that what we take for granted may not be here for our children

Pollution should never be the price of prosperity.