Quotes About Our Oceans

#1. For too long we have placed an irrational burden upon our oceans by demanding only a narrow selection of species, which has led to unsustainable fishing and economic practices. If we instead ask the ocean what it is willing to supply, we engage in an inherently more sustainable relationship.

Barton Seaver

#2. Remove the predators, and the whole ecosystem begins to crash like a house of cards. As the sharks disappear, the predator-prey balance dramatically shifts, and the health of our oceans declines.

Brian Skerry

#3. Our oceans cover two-thirds of what my grandfather called our water planet, and the part of the ocean that falls under the jurisdiction of the United States covers an area larger than the country itself.

Philippe Cousteau Jr.

#4. Eighty percent of global warming is the result of man's wrongful use of the resources of the planet and the dumping of millions upon millions of tons of nuclear and other waste in the world, creating great toxic areas all over our skies, our oceans, our rivers, and the earth.

Benjamin Creme

#5. Oil is drowning our oceans and drowning our boreal forests.

Winona LaDuke

#6. I got the wake-up call that no one is policing our oceans. I wondered, how can I do anything? What really can I do to make things better? There are some perks to being a celebrity. My job is to be funny once in a while, but it's my responsibility to make good use of it.

Angela Kinsey

#7. We've built, drilled, and shipped indiscriminately across our oceans, with little consideration for the natural environment that is critical to the health of many of our other ocean uses, like food and recreation.

Philippe Cousteau Jr.

#8. The most important thing we can do to save our oceans is to dramatically expand our efforts to establish new marine protected areas and make sure that critical fish spawning sites and ecosystems remain undisturbed.

Serge Dedina

#9. People sometimes feel frustrated about what's going on in our oceans and environment, and 'Whale Wars' shows that ordinary people can take action and make things happen.

Paul Watson

#10. Our oceans are facing innumerable threats - from overfishing and pollution to ocean acidification and invasive species - yet we haven't had a blueprint for its use and development, incredible as that seems.

Philippe Cousteau Jr.

#11. Some parts of our oceans, like the rich and mysterious recesses of our Atlantic submarine canyons and seamounts, are so stunning and sensitive they deserve to be protected from destructive activities.

Philippe Cousteau Jr.

#12. Since the majority of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean, not to mention much of the world's protein, it is not an exaggeration to say that when our oceans' health declines, our very survival is at risk.

Brian Skerry

#13. The environmentalists say capitalism is killing our oceans, air, land, and forests. Capitalists argue that they provide food, fuel, and building materials for a growing world.

Robert Kiyosaki

#14. The oceans are more or less in disrepair. Long Beach really is making an effort to acknowledge this, and that's a great place to start. I'm trying to spread at least the knowledge that it's never too early to take care of our oceans and our environment.

Aaron Peirsol

#15. Worldwide, our oceans are warming, rising, and becoming dangerously acidic as a result of carbon pollution and climate change - endangering much that we hold dear.

Sheldon Whitehouse

#16. We know that when we protect our oceans we're protecting our future.

William J. Clinton

#17. There are so many issues in our oceans - like the near extinction of blue fin tuna - that should be taken more seriously worldwide.

Heston Blumenthal

#18. Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff-like callousness by the world's fisheries.

Daniel Pauly

#19. My position is this. If we can't protect sanctuaries, if we can't save the whales, the sharks, the fish, our oceans will die.

Paul Watson

#20. I wish America would spend even half as much time complaining about plastics in our oceans as we do about actresses' plastic surgery.

Bette Midler

#21. WE CAN NOT LIVE ON THIS PLANET WITH DEAD OCEANS. IF OUR OCEANS DIE, WE DIE.

Paul Watson

#22. Captain Falco saw the diminishment of biodiversity in our oceans over a span of nearly seven decades. He was dedicated to the protection of life and habitats in the sea. He was a legendary mariner, diver, oceanographer, and conservationist. The world is a better place because of him.

Paul Watson

#23. Neither our oceans nor our radar nor our fighters can keep us intact through another major war.

Philip Morrison

#24. The C.E.O. of Google doesn't look like a Dick Cheney World Domination sort whom we should worry about as Google ogles our houses, our oceans, our foibles, our movements and our tastes.

Maureen Dowd

#25. To the naked eye, our oceans are beautiful. But scientists tell us that all of the world's fisheries will collapse by 2048, unless we change how we manage them. Help protect our oceans so the next generation can also enjoy their bounty.

Ted Danson

#26. Unless we stop the degradation of our oceans, marine ecological systems will begin collapsing and when enough of them fail, the oceans will die. And if the oceans die, then civilization collapses and we all die

Paul Watson

#27. this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal ..."~~Barack Obama upon winning the Democratic nomination for presidency conveys his thinking of what that means ....for the world, Tuesday, JUNE 03, 2008

Barack Obama

#28. We can still maintain our coasts and oceans for the generations to come, who deserve what we have.

Aaron Peirsol

#29. We are not at the bargaining table in agreement to end abuse to our world. We are on the battlefield deciding everyday if we will let this world die or live, by how we contribute to its treatment.

Shannon L. Alder

#30. Our solar system is fantastically bizarre. There are worlds with features we never imagined. Storms larger than planets, moons with under-surface oceans, lakes of methane, worldlets that swap places ... and that's just at Saturn.

Phil Plait

#31. In a few short years you might have to become a scuba diver and go hundreds of feet underwater - It will be the last refuge of pure aura and power on our planet, the oceans' depths.

Frederick Lenz

#32. Hillary Clinton is listening to the scientists who tell us that - unless we act boldly and transform our energy system in the very near future - there will be more drought, more floods, more acidification of the oceans, more rising sea levels.

Bernie Sanders

#33. Our life on earth cannot sustain without healthy oceans - and because of that, the beings who inhabit and allow that eco system to work need our help. Let's start with our wonderment, and go from there. Allow that, and it becomes easy.

Maggie Q

#34. The oceans are pretty unexplored places and the final frontier on our planet; also because they're the source of life. There are dramatic things happening to them at the moment, and they're worth exploring.

Peter Sarsgaard

#35. Some things are only capable of being done in space. Examples of that are looking at our Earth from that far away, and understanding the entire processes of storms and weather patterns, and oceans, and coastlines.

Laurel Clark

#36. We do not have the luxury of two big oceans protecting us as we have had in the past, for we now have a new kind of enemy who deals with stealthiness. Our ability to protect ourselves is having the information ahead of time so we can thwart the attack.

Bill Nelson

#37. With no other choices open to us, we'd turned our gaze seaward. The oceans were our America: they reached farther than any prairie, untamed as on the first day of creation. Nobody owned them.

Carsten Jensen

#38. Whatever horrible things we shall meet on our way, hot deserts or furious oceans, at least we will know that we are on the way and we exist!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#39. 80 percent of our global fish stocks are fully exploited, overly exploited or have collapsed. Two billion people rely on the oceans for their primary source of protein.

Barton Seaver

#40. Our best shot at finding life in our solar system might be to look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Mars, increasingly, looks like a dead planet. But the oceans beneath the ice cover of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn may actually have more liquid water than the oceans of Earth.

Michio Kaku

#41. The act of writing if one is conscious of legibility is a wonderful discipline. Our minds, which roil like captured oceans, are forced to order themselves and to send coherent messages through our fingers...writing is like yoga or Thai Chi; it forces our bodies to obey our minds.

Edward St Paige

#42. I see the day in our own lifetime that reverence for the natural systems, the oceans, the rainforests, the soil, the grasslands, and all other living things will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it.

Jerry Brown

#43. In truth, our aliveness depends on our ability to sustain wonder:
to lengthen the moments we are truly uncovered, to be still and quiet
till all the elements of the earth and all the secrets of the oceans
stir the aspects of life waiting within us.

Mark Nepo

#44. The oceans deserve our respect and care, but you have to know something before you can care about it.

Sylvia Earle

#45. We have to immediately stop using the oceans as a dumping ground for our urban and industrial waste.

Serge Dedina

#46. Our desire must be like a slow and stately ship, sailing across endless oceans, never in search of safe anchorage. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, it will find mooring for a moment.

Etty Hillesum

#47. We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.

Sylvia Earle

#48. Now we stand at our own crossroads, looking out upon two futures: one with rising temperatures, rising oceans, and rising violence on a hot and strip-mined planet and another with expanding organic harvests, growing solar arrays, and deepening global partnerships on a green and thriving Earth.

Van Jones

#49. The love we hold sees no boundaries, it feels no limits, it crosses all frontiers. It can enrich us or send us spiralling to the deepest fathoms and if it is true, it can cross oceans and climb mountains, blind to race, creed and colour...It is a beautiful thing, this thing that claims our hearts.

Virginia Alison

#50. We are wasting our water mostly by putting waste into it. One cubic meter of wastewater can pollute ten cubic meters of water. Discharging wastewater into oceans turns freshwater into the less useful salty stuff, and desalination is expensive.

Rose George

#51. If Earth ever suffers a runaway greenhouse effect (like what has happened on Venus), then our atmosphere would trap excess amounts of solar energy, the air temperature would rise, and the oceans would swiftly evaporate into the atmosphere as they sustained a rolling boil. This would be bad.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#52. God is our refuge and strength, always ready to help in times of trouble. 2 So we will not fear when earthquakes come and the mountains crumble into the sea. 3 Let the oceans roar and foam. Let the mountains tremble as the waters surge!

Anonymous

#53. A healthy ocean is vital to our economy and well-being. We need clean and healthy oceans to sustain tourism and fisheries.

Scott Peters

#54. Mountains and oceans have whole worlds of innumerable wondrous features. We should understand that it is not only our distant surroundings that are like this, but even what is right here, even a single drop of water.

Dogen

#55. The Moon is our local port opening to the universe; in the future, it's through that port we will sail our ships to the coastless oceans.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#56. We know that to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that to pollute the air or the oceans in order to achieve some short-term benefit would be to destroy the very basis for our survival.

Dalai Lama

#57. If we moved from industrialized agriculture to re-localized organic agriculture, we could sequester about one quarter of the carbon moving into the air and destroying our glaciers, oceans, forests and lands.

Winona LaDuke

#58. The health of life on Earth depends on its oceans. But unless we save our seas from the growing mounds of pop bottles, cigarette butts and plastic trash, soon there won't be much healthy sea left.

Zoe Helene

#59. Since oceans are the life support system of our planet, regulating the climate, providing most of our oxygen and feeding over a billion people, what's bad for oceans is bad for us - very bad.

Philippe Cousteau Jr.

#60. As long as we relate to the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the fields and the oceans as properties which we can manipulate according to our real or fabricated needs, nature remains opaque, and does not reveal to us its true being.

Henri Nouwen

#61. The oceans produce up to 70 percent of our oxygen, they shape our climate, and they support an American oceans economy larger than our nation's entire agriculture sector.

Frances Beinecke

#62. We've been a country that's been fortunate to be protected by two oceans, to not have serious attacks on our territory for most of our history. And we were unfortunately reminded in a very devastating way of our vulnerability.

Condoleezza Rice

#63. Nature is our friend - trees, squirrels, grass, fields, meadows, oceans - without people. Hike. Walk. Stroll. Bike. Swim. Be in a still place and feel eternity. Have a great time. Just feel it.

Frederick Lenz

#64. Our march toward self-annihilation has already obliterated ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans and wiped out half of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet.25 At this rate, by 2030, only ten percent of the Earth's tropical forests will remain.

Chris Hedges

#65. Our surest protection against assault from abroad has been not all our guards, gates and guns, or even our two oceans, but our essential goodness as a people. Our richest asset has been not our material wealth but our values.

Theodore C. Sorensen

#66. No matter how remote we feel we are from the oceans, every act each one of us takes in our everyday lives affects our planet's water cycle and in return affects us.

Fabien Cousteau

#67. If adventure has a final and all-embracing motive, it is surely this: we go out because it is our nature to go out, to climb mountains, and to paddle rivers, to fly to the planets and plunge into the depths of the oceans ... When man ceases to do these things, he is no longer man.

Wilfrid Noyce

#68. Human activity is having a major impact on the planet. We consume or have diverted a large proportion of the productivity of the land and oceans. Our hunger for land crowds out fellow species. Our waste products pollute the waters, warm the atmosphere and acidify the oceans.

Ian Goldin

#69. If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains.

Alain De Botton

#70. Our air, water, soil, forests, oceans, rivers, lakes, scenic beauty, wildlife habitat, minerals, that is the wealth of the country.

Gaylord Nelson

#71. Sunsets steal our breath. Caribbean blue stills our hearts. Newborn babies stir our tears. But take all these away - strip away the sunsets, oceans, and cooing babies - and leave us in the Sahara, and we still have reason to dance in the sand. Why? Because God is with us.

Max Lucado

#72. This is the moment we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.

Barack Obama

#73. We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation.

Neil Gaiman

#74. It is never too late to go quietly to our lakes, rivers, oceans, even our small streams, and say to the sea gulls, the great blue herons, the bald eagles, the salmon, that we are sorry.

Brenda Peterson

#75. This time, instead of moving oceans and healing planets, let's get our bills in order and pay down the debt so we control our own future.

Artur Davis

#76. Everything in the phenomenal universe is straight line and circle. The horizon, our heads, arms, electrons, the oceans, planets and stars. Their principle function is to radiate. The task of the human being is also to radiate.

Alonzo King

#77. We inter-breath with the rain forests, we drink from the oceans. They are part of our own body.

Nhat Hanh

#78. If you took all the sand from all the beaches, all the desserts, and all the oceans and called that the Universe, our whole solar system would be less than one grain of sand.

Seth Shostak

#79. The 2008 election settled nothing, not even for a while. Our national politics are reflecting what appears to be going on geologically, on the bottom of the oceans and beneath the crust of the Earth: the tectonic plates are moving.

Peggy Noonan

#80. Our planet's lands and oceans are already stretched to meet the demands of 7 billion people. The human population continues to grow. The search for sustainable solutions is an economic and a moral imperative if we are to create the future we want.

Ban Ki-moon

#81. Knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it.

John F. Kennedy

#82. Human technology has made it to Mars. We are transmitting gorgeous pictures from it. Yet we have not explored our own planet. Two-thirds of it is covered with oceans that are still mysterious places.

Barbara Block

#83. God created the heavens and the earth, the oceans and the waves for our enjoyment. Surfing is just my way of worshipping Him.

Bethany Hamilton

#84. If the sea is sick, we'll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one.

Sylvia Earle