Science & Tech Quote by Lyndon B. Johnson

Johnson pitches environmental stewardship as a moral audit that outlives any legislative win or moonshot. The line is built on a quiet insult to the mid-century American self-image: we’re proud of our “miracles of technology,” yet those miracles may be the very reason our descendants feel “sorrow.” He isn’t rejecting progress; he’s reframing it as insufficient, even childish, if it arrives with a scarred landscape attached. The real flex in the sentence is the time horizon. By invoking “future generations,” Johnson drags a short-term, boosterish political culture into a longer courtroom where the jury can’t be lobbied.

The subtext is classic Great Society triangulation: yes to growth, yes to modernity, but with a federally enforced conscience. “A glimpse of the world as it was created” is rhetorically shrewd. It borrows the language of reverence without turning the argument into church talk, making conservation sound less like a hobby for elites and more like a patriotic obligation. He’s also subtly shifting blame. “Not just as it looked when we got through with it” frames environmental damage as an act committed by “us,” collectively, not by a few bad actors. That expands the mandate for government action.

Context matters: Johnson’s presidency sat at the crossroads of postwar abundance and the dawning awareness of its costs. In the 1960s, pollution, sprawl, and industrial extraction were no longer background noise; they were becoming visible, contentious, legislated. The quote reads like an attempt to secure a legacy not only of programs and infrastructure, but of restraint - a rare political ask, then and now.