Earth might one day soon resemble the planet Venus.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

At Virgin, we have always backed the power of the entrepreneur and inventor to find solutions to tricky problems. Why should climate change and the battle against carbon be any different?

We’re in very bad trouble if we don’t understand the planet we’re trying to save.

For me, the real earth is that chosen part of the universe, still almost universally dispersed and in course of gradual segregation, but which is little by little taking on body and form in Christ.

There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet.

It’s not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it’s a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.

If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn’t be here. I guarantee you that.

There’s 20 companies that I have investments in – some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

Why should I be studying for a future that soon may not exist?

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

We need every person on Earth to acknowledge that climate change is real and encourage each other and our leaders to address the challenge.

Someday I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

The effects of climate change are real and must be acted on.

People are unaware of what is going on. When I talk to people, they know the basics, they know the planet is warming because of greenhouse gases… but they don’t know the actual consequence of that.

Even though the risks of death are higher driving than flying, many people would rather drive simply because they feel they have more control driving. The facts are that only a few hundred people die a year flying, and 44,000 are killed a year driving.

It is not, of course, complete yet – but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem – and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home.

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.

The senses are of the earth, the reason stands apart from them in contemplation.

All my authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.

Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.

What is true of the individual will be tomorrow true of the whole nation if individuals will but refuse to lose heart and hope.

Once I knew only darkness and stillness… my life was without past or future… but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.

Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don’t know the plot. They don’t know their own individual plot… they don’t know what’s going to happen to them.

As you heat the planet up, it’s just like boiling a pot.

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.

Most of us enter adult life with great ambitions for how we will start our own ventures, but the harshness of life wears us down. We settle into some job and slowly give in to the illusion that our bosses care about us and our future, that they spend time thinking of our welfare.

We’ve gotta become the Martians. I’m a Martian – I tell you to become Martians. And we’ve gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.

Everywhere I go I find that people… both leaders and individuals… are asking one basic question, ‚Is there any hope for the future?‘ My answer is the same, ‚Yes, through Jesus Christ.‘

David Icke reminded me of Malcolm X.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

I had faith in Israel before it was established, I have in it now. I believe it has a glorious future before it – not just another sovereign nation, but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization.

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.

As a British driver, you get compared to Lewis and I get that. But when he came to McLaren, they were doing well and had a championship-winning car. I’m in a very different situation so I don’t compare myself to his stats.

Learning about climate change triggered my depression in the first place. But it was also what got me out of my depression, because there were things I could do to improve the situation. I don’t have time to be depressed anymore.

Sweden is not a green paradise, it has one of the biggest carbon footprints.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

One thing that I find very unmotivating is the kind of Plan B argument: when Earth gets destroyed, you want to be somewhere else. That doesn’t work for me. We have sent robotic probes now to every place in the solar system, and this is the best one.

My business is to prevent the future.

From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals.

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited… The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.

On one of my last days at school, the headmaster said I would either end up in prison or become a millionaire. That was quite a startling prediction, but in some respects, he was right on both counts!

I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.

My life is not unlike Truman’s. I can’t go anywhere.

I haven’t had that one great love, which is good. I don’t want that to be in the past – I want it to be in the future.

Mine is better than ours.

People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it’s cool.

Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.