I am aching for the world I live in to become a better place for my children.

"It would be something fine if we could learn how to bless the lives of children. They are the people of new life. Children are the only people nobody can blame. They are the only ones always willing to make a start; they have no choice. Children are the ways the world begin again and again.

"But in general, our children have no voice — that we will listen to. We force, we blank them into the bugle/bell regulated lineup of the Army/school, and we insist on silence.

"But even if we cannot learn to bless their lives (our future times), at least we can try to find out how we already curse and burden their experience: how we limit the wheeling of their inner eyes, how we terrify their trust, and how we condemn the raucous laughter of their natural love. What's more, if we will hear them, they will teach us what they need; they will bluntly formulate the tenderness of their deserving."

It would be the "sin of our generation" if we fail to provide a good environment for our children.

I think our children and children everywhere deserve a more positive view of the future and their place in it. They display such disillusionment and despair because they do not see us, their elders, and the politicians in this place, doing enough to guarantee safe custody of our fragile planet to future generations. They see most adults as being too concerned with the immediate, with the dollar, and most of us with no vision for the future.

Something about the fact that I made some contribution to either my country, or those who were less well off. I think back to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do this? I'd like to feel that I'd done something to lessen that suffering.

Protecting our children from the cruelty of the world doesn't mean shielding them from the realities of the world. Tell them the truth. Teach them to care. Give them a voice. Prepare them not to withstand the world, but to change the world.

We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

Children are really desperate to see the world as pleasing; and their desperateness is part of a wise hope.

If we pass on an unsustainable environment to our children we have failed them.

If we fail to instruct our children in justice, religion and liberty, we will be condemning them to a world without virtue, a life in the twilight of a civilization, where the great truths have been forgotten.

Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.

It takes so little to make a child happy, that it is a pity in a world full of sunshine and pleasant things, that there should be any wistful faces, empty hands, or lonely little hearts.

The world is not always a kind place. That’s something all children learn for themselves, whether we want them to or not, but it’s something they really need our help to understand.

This will be the greatest legacy that we can proudly leave behind for our next generation, let us sacrifice our today so that our children can have a better tomorrow.