But if future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than with sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as God really made it, not just as it looked when we got through with it.
Interpretation
We should strive to improve the world for future generations, not just through technology but also by preserving its natural beauty.
This quote emphasizes the responsibility of current generations to leave a positive legacy for the future. While technological advancements are important, it is equally essential to maintain and appreciate the natural world as it exists, ensuring that future generations inherit a planet that is not only advanced but also beautiful and thriving, reflecting the original creation rather than a degraded version of it.
In practice
In a speech about environmental policy, one might say, 'As Lyndon B. Johnson wisely noted, we must leave a glimpse of the world as God made it.'
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time.
We do this in order to slow down aggression. We do this to increase the confidence of the brave people of South Vietnam who have bravely born this brutal battle for so many years with so many casualties. And we do this to convince the leaders of North Vietnam-and all who seek to share their conquest-of a simple fact: We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.
So far are we generally from thinking what we often say of the shortness of life, that at the time when it is necessarily shortest we form projects which we delay to execute, indulge such expectations as nothing but along train of events can gratify, and suffer those passions to gain upon us which are only excusable in the prime of life.
You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
If government is to serve any purpose it is to do for others what they are unable to do for themselves.
It is impossible to deny that Christians and Muslims have a common agenda here: both faiths have at their heart the living image of a community raised up by God's call to reveal to the world what God's purpose is for humanity.
Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.
A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.
Every man obeys Christ as he prizes Christ, and no otherwise.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.
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