“What's happening in the world and in the ocean has changed our time horizon. We can be incredibly pessimistic on the short term, and mourn what we lost and what we really took for granted. But we can still be optimistic on the long term, and we can still be ambitious about what we fight for and what we expect from our governments, from our planet. Corals have been living on planet Earth for hundreds of millions of years. They survived the extinction of the dinosaurs. They're badasses. An individual coral can go through tremendous trauma and fully recover if it's given a chance and it's given protection. Corals have always been playing the long game, and now so are we.”

“We can change our lives. We can do, have, and be exactly what we wish.”

“It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.”

“Our deeds still travel with us from afar/And what we have been makes us what we are.”

“If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”

“We have been troubled about the world, and had almost lost faith in man; it helps to think about the long history of the earth, and of how life came to be. And when we think in terms of millions of years, we are not so impatient that our own problems be solved tomorrow.”

“If we can forgive what's been done to us… If we can forgive what we've done to others… If we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.”

“What we think determines what happens to us, so if we want to change our lives, we need to stretch our minds.”

“If we spend our lives resisting what happened, which is what we are doing when we cannot accept the reality of what has happened, we are living our life pushing against what was instead of putting our energy towards what we want to create instead.”

“The government can't change the weather. I said that in the speech. We can pass a bunch of laws that will destroy our economy, but it isn't going to change the weather. Because, for example, there are other countries that are polluting in the atmosphere much greater than we are at this point, China, India, all these countries that are still growing. They're not going to stop doing what they're doing. America is a country, it's not a planet. So we can pass a bunch of laws or executive orders that will do nothing to change the climate or the weather but will devastate our economy. Devastate it!”