Top 6 Toby Ord Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The Anthropocene is the time of profound human effects on the environment, while the Precipice is the time where humanity is at high risk of destroying itself.”

— Toby Ord

2. “I realized that my money would do vastly more good for others than it could for me and decided to make a commitment to donating to the most effective charities I could find. Many people contacted me asking how they could do this as well, and so I set up giving what we can.”

— Toby Ord

3. “Humanity is currently in control of its own fate. We can choose our future. Of course, we each have differing visions of an ideal future, and many of us are more focused on our personal concerns than on achieving any such ideal. But if enough humans wanted to, we could select any of a dizzying variety of possible futures. The same is not true for chimpanzees. Or blackbirds. Or any other of Earth’s species.”

— Toby Ord

4. “What makes each of us special, so worthy of protection and celebration is something subtle about us, in the way that the matter of which we are comprised has been so delicately arranged as to allow us to think and love and create and dream.”

— Toby Ord

5. “So if we drop the baton, succumbing to an existential catastrophe, we would fail our ancestors in a multitude of ways. We would fail to achieve the dreams they hoped for; we would betray the trust they placed in us, their heirs; and we would fail in any duty we had to pay forward the work they did for us. To neglect existential risk might thus be to wrong not only the people of the future, but the people of the past.”

— Toby Ord

$Toby Ord Quote: “Indeed, when I think of the unbroken chain of generations leading to our time and of everything they have built for us, I am humbled. I am overwhelmed with gratitude; shocked by the enormity of the inheritance and at the impossibility of returning even the smallest fraction of the favor. Because a hundred billion of the people to whom I owe everything are gone forever, and because what they created is so much larger than my life, than my entire generation.”$

6. “Indeed, when I think of the unbroken chain of generations leading to our time and of everything they have built for us, I am humbled. I am overwhelmed with gratitude; shocked by the enormity of the inheritance and at the impossibility of returning even the smallest fraction of the favor. Because a hundred billion of the people to whom I owe everything are gone forever, and because what they created is so much larger than my life, than my entire generation.”

— Toby Ord