Al Gore Quotes

I think the ethical standards established in this White House have been the highest in the history of the White House.

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.

I've been dreaming of this moment since I was a kid growing up in Tennessee: that one day, I'd have the chance to come here to Madison Square Garden and be the warm-up act for Elvis.

The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television, a distracting and absorbing medium which seems determined to entertain itself more than it informs and educates.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government.

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

The American people overwhelmingly want our troops out of Iraq. They want the federal government to take real and immediate action to combat global warming and to significantly expand support for stem cell research. Democrats almost unanimously support the people's wishes onthese crucial issues. Republicans don't.

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.

We now face the prospect of a kind of global civil war between those who refuse to consider the consequences of civilization's relentless advance and those who refuse to be silent partners in the destruction. More and more people of conscience are joining the effort to resist, but the time has come to make this struggle the central organizing principle of world civilizations.

The ability of big money to shape perceptions - where you have four anti-climate lobbyists for every single member of the House and Senate - is a big factor.

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.

When people flirt with despair about the future, they are less likely to take the actions necessary to safeguard it, focusing instead on the short-term.

I would distinguish between Donald Trump and the United States of America. Although he is president, he does not speak for the country on the climate change, and that was vividly illustrated in the aftermath of his speech pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement. Almost immediately, not only did the rest of the world double down on its commitments, but also here in this country, governors, mayors, business leaders, they said, we're still in the Paris Agreement, and they're doubling down. A lot of cities have now made a decision to go 100% renewable energy.

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.

Adopting a central organizing principle means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, to halt the destruction of the environment.

A zebra does not change its spots.

I'm not trying to top anything. I'm trying to be useful, to play a positive role, to serve the public interest.

Airplane travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo.

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'm still trying to figure out exactly what President Trump represents in American politics. But, if nothing else, he represents a way for tens of millions of people who were desperate for change to just turn the table over and say, we want to start over again. But it is a challenge for our democracy. It definitely is. But, again, the remedy has to be devoting enough attention to restoring the way we make collective decisions in this country.

We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

This is by far the most serious crisis civilisation has ever faced.

The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.

The key.. will be a new public awareness of how serious is the threat to the global environment. Those who have a vested interest in the status quo will probably continue to be able to stifle any meaningful change until enough citizens.. are willing to speak out.

When politics is too slow, change has to come from culture.

...it ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five-year period.

There is an air of unreality in debating these arcane points when the world is changing in such dramatic ways right in front of our eyes because of global warming.

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

Some people accuse me of exaggeration, so let me be clear. Those people seek nothing less than the complete and utter destruction of the American way of life.

I never like the question about letter grades, but I think Trump is failing. I think that every day there's another set of tweets and another set of controversies, and nothing seems to be getting done that's any good. And there seems to be kind of a policy paralysis in Washington. Even the appointments he's supposed to make as a new president, so I focus most of all on climate, and so my opinion of his time as president is certainly influenced by my opinion of the job he's done on climate. He's tried to move the country in the wrong direction.

I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, 'Hey man, we don't go for that anymore.'

The ten hottest years in the atmospheric record, going back only 160 years, have been in the last eleven years.

I doubt nuclear power will play a much larger role than it does now.

It's as if we think the laws of physics are subject to debate and amendment and political contributions can sway the laws of physics.

Someone who expresses a view that is contrary to the view of the overwhelming majority should be allowed to stand undisturbed as a monument to our commitment to free speech.

I have absolutely no plans and no expectations of ever being a candidate again.

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

The symbolism - and the substantive significance - of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on Earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis.

The global warming deniers persist in this air of unreality. After all, the entire north polar icecap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this?

If you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He's already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons. He poison-gassed his own people. He used poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors. This man has no compunction about killing lots and lots of people. So this is a way to save lives and to save the stability and peace of a region of the world that is important to the peace and security of the entire world.

I don't really consider this a political issue, I consider it to be a moral issue.

At some point, a false belief collides with physical reality.

There are good people, who are in politics - in both parties - who hold this at arm's length, because if they acknowledge it and recognize it, then the moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable.

It's a blessing to have work that feels fulfilling.

[T]he scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged.

You have to rip your opponent's lungs out and then move on.

Is there some magic wand they can wave on it and presto! - physics is overturned and carbon dioxide doesn't trap heat anymore? And when we see all these things happening on the Earth itself, what in the hell do they think is causing it? The scientists have long held that the evidence in their considered word is "unequivocal," which has been endorsed by every national academy of science in every major country in the entire world.

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.