Quotes About Paul Watson

#1. It doesn't matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.

Paul Watson

#2. I used to swim with these beavers in a beaver pond when I was 10. I went back when I was 11 and found there were no more beavers. I found that trappers had taken them all, so I became quite angry, and that winter I began to walk the trap lines and free animals from the traps and destroy the traps.

Paul Watson

#3. I want to stay in the ocean. I'm not going to be able to do that from some holding cell in Japan.

Paul Watson

#4. The only thing scarier than Godzilla is Godzilla's lawyers.

Paul Watson

#5. We're just a conceited naked ape, but in our minds we're some 'divine legend' and we see ourselves as some sort of god, thinking we can decide what will live and what will die, what will be saved and what will be destroyed, but honestly we're just a bunch of primates out of control.

Paul Watson

#6. 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

#7. My clients are the whales and the seals.

Paul Watson

#8. When I hear so-called professional journalists ask why we have celebrities speak for us and for the animals, the environment or social causes, I marvel at their denial of the rules of their own trade.

Paul Watson

#9. Protesting is fundamentally submissive.

Paul Watson

#10. Sea Shepherd is to terrorism what Groucho was to Marxism.

Paul Watson

#11. That fact is that we live in an extremely violent culture, and we all justify violence if it's for what we believe in .

Paul Watson

#12. You can't love nature with a gun

Paul Watson

#13. I have hope that humanity will be cured of our collective ecological insanity and that we adapt to living within the boundaries of the laws of ecology.

Paul Watson

#14. Greenpeace is the world's largest feel-good organisation now, and I can say that 'cause I am one of their co-founders.

Paul Watson

#15. Sometimes going to jail is just the price you have to pay for social reform or social change.

Paul Watson

#16. Earthworms are far more valuable than people.

Paul Watson

#17. There are many who condemn my crew and I for taking the law into our own hands and for taking on the barons of corporate profit.

Paul Watson

#18. Every fish in the ocean is in danger.

Paul Watson

#19. Japan is a bully nation that takes what it wants and threatens any who oppose it.

Paul Watson

#20. The oceans are the last free place on the planet.

Paul Watson

#21. I experienced the California Northridge Earthquake of 1994 and the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, and I have thus seen firsthand how terrible and awesomely devastating a force of nature can be.

Paul Watson

#22. There are quite a few disgruntled Greenpeacers who are opposed to its policy of non-cooperation.

Paul Watson

#23. Killing a baby seal is about the easiest thing you can do if you're inclined to be sadistic; you certainly can't say there's any sport in it - the animal is totally defenceless.

Paul Watson

#24. In December 2012, the U.S. 9th district court granted a temporary injunction to the Japanese whalers that ordered the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society U.S.A. to not approach within 500 yards of the whaling vessels.

Paul Watson

#25. Intelligence is the ability of a species to live in harmony with its environment.

Paul Watson

#26. Taiwan gives a lot of foreign aid to Costa Rica, so it looks like they are basically buying the right to fish, even though it's not legal.

Paul Watson

#27. The war against the Canadian seal hunt is more than a protest. It is a crusade to bring harmony between the natural world and humanity. All of us who oppose it are dedicated to the protection of life and the abolition of cruelty.

Paul Watson

#28. I don't think that any government has a right to subvert the truth or to cover up the truth, and all I see WikiLeaks doing is exposing the truth.

Paul Watson

#29. You will not ever perceive the truth that is reality. There are many realities.

Paul Watson

#30. I don't eat fish because there is no such thing as sustainable fishing in the world right now.

Paul Watson

#31. My grandfather carried me around on his shoulders at 85.

Paul Watson

#32. You cannot commit an act of violence against a non-sentient object, only against a living thing.

Paul Watson

#33. The fact is I have never been convicted of a crime.

Paul Watson

#34. Commercial fishermen are the greediest, stupidest people on earth.

Paul Watson

#35. We live in a media culture and whoever controls and influences and uses media the best has the power for change.

Paul Watson

#36. I'm thankful to have time to write.

Paul Watson

#37. To me extremism is targeting endangered whales in a whale sanctuary in violation of a moratorium. That, to me, is extreme.

Paul Watson

#38. There's no rest when you're on planetary duty.

Paul Watson

#39. Nobody has ever been hurt by the actions of ships I have been on.

Paul Watson

#40. Once we get three more directors elected, the Sierra Club will no longer be pro-hunting and pro-trapping and we can use the resources of the $95-million-a-year budget to address some of these issues.

Paul Watson

#41. No words can describe the personal liberation that heading seaward bestows upon me. In this aquatic realm, no man or woman is subject to the petty decrees of social bureaucracy.

Paul Watson

#42. In Ecuador, if I go after an Ecuadoran, I'm in trouble; if I go after a Costa Rican, I'm a hero.

Paul Watson

#43. The Sea Shepherd crew is doing what governments should be doing, but refuse to do themselves, because of the threats of trade retaliation from Japan.

Paul Watson

#44. Sustainable fishing is a fraud. It's a marketing term that really means 'business as usual.'

Paul Watson

#45. People say I manipulate the media. Well, duh. We live in a media culture, so why on earth wouldn't I?

Paul Watson

#46. I was doing a talk show in Vancouver, and somebody called in a bomb threat to protest my violence, which I thought was pretty strange. We had to evacuate.

Paul Watson

#47. We go after unlawful activities.

Paul Watson

#48. Documentaries make a difference.

Paul Watson

#49. Domestic house cats kill more fish than all the world's seals put together.

Paul Watson

#50. We're close to losing our essential diversity. Look at our wheat crops - we rely on a handful of grain crops and plants that we've refined and bred over hundreds of years.

Paul Watson

#51. I'm not really a fugitive.

Paul Watson

#52. Way back in October 2007, I had urged thousands of Australians to vote for Kevin Rudd and Peter Garrett's Labor Party. Why? Because they promised to get tough on illegal Japanese whaling.

Paul Watson

#53. I'm not interested in culture; I'm interested in the law.

Paul Watson

#54. Whales are killed today to supply the limited demand for whale meat or to be used in pet foods or as fodder for fur-bearing animals used in the fur trade.

Paul Watson

#55. If you don't know an answer, a fact, a statistic - make it up on the spot.

Paul Watson

#56. No species is more important than others.

Paul Watson

#57. I feel that we have a responsibility to try to do everything we can to protect species, and the best way to do that is to uphold international conservation law.

Paul Watson

#58. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society recognizes that the deaths of four sealers is a tragedy, but Sea Shepherd also recognizes that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of seal pups is an even greater tragedy.

Paul Watson

#59. If you do not intend to kill anybody, if you make every effort to not kill and injure anybody, that's all you really can do. You can't stop somebody from walking into a situation, and we really can't be too overly preoccupied with this.

Paul Watson

#60. We'll lose more species of plants and animals between 2000 and 2065 than we've lost in the last 65 million years. If we don't find answers to these problems, we're gonna be victims of this extinction event that we're at fault for.

Paul Watson

#61. Pigs eat more tuna than all the planet's sharks combined.

Paul Watson

#62. To slaughter grand and beautiful creatures like these tuskers, whether terrestrial or marine, solely to obtain a few teeth indicates that we have not evolved very much since the days our forebears lived in caves and saught to prove their superiority by adorning themselves with teeth and claws

Paul Watson

#63. In 1993, I chased Cuban and Spanish drag trawlers off the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland. And it cost them $35 million in losses.

Paul Watson

#64. 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

#65. Russian subs are a bargain at $60,000. Unfortunately, none of the dials or instructions are in English.

Paul Watson

#66. I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds.

Paul Watson

#67. Unlike aboriginal hunters, commercial seal hunters leave the carcasses on the ice to rot.

Paul Watson

#68. Nazi propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels once remarked that if a lie is told often enough people will begin to see the lie as truth.

Paul Watson

#69. I have an unexplainable belief that I will never cause harm or be harmed while at sea. Because of this, I feel secure at sea: I feel secure in the ice, I feel secure in the storms, and I feel secure in confrontations.

Paul Watson

#70. Be a voice for the future and a voice for the planet.

Paul Watson

#71. In 'Deadliest Catch,' we have men in ships in rough seas catching crabs. With 'Whale Wars,' we have men and women from a dozen different nations going out to sea in rough weather to help save the whales. We also have icebergs, whales, penguins, and dramatic ship-to-ship confrontations.

Paul Watson

#72. I don't have a religion, but I respect them.

Paul Watson

#73. I'm never horrible to anybody. My problem, and you can ask any of my friends, is that I'm too nice to everybody.

Paul Watson

#74. I take a biocentric point of view. I look at things from the point of view of the Earth and the laws of ecology. As opposed to the anthropocentric point of view, where everything revolves around humanity.

Paul Watson

#75. I have known Farley Mowat all of my life, from reading his books as a child to becoming a close friend of his over the last three decades.

Paul Watson

#76. A vegan riding a hummer contributes less to greenhouse gas emissions than a meat eater riding a bicycle.

Paul Watson

#77. A fish is more valuable swimming in the sea maintaining the integrity of oceanic eco-systems than it is on anyone's plate.

Paul Watson

#78. If we wipe out the fish, the oceans are going to die. If the oceans die, we die. We can't live on this planet with a dead ocean.

Paul Watson

#79. I will not watch a whale die. I've not seen a whale die since I left Greenpeace in 1977.

Paul Watson

#80. If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don't look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights.

Paul Watson

#81. 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

#82. Atlantic puffins starve to death so that Danish chickens can feast on their fish.

Paul Watson

#83. When I was born, there were three billion people on the planet.

Paul Watson

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

Paul Watson

#85. Ships are expendable; the whales are not.

Paul Watson

#86. We need to stop flying, stop driving cars and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles.

Paul Watson

#87. There is no sustainable future for fisheries as long as human populations continue to increase.

Paul Watson

#88. As long as there is a Southern Ocean whale sanctuary, Sea Shepherd crew will continue to patrol and defend it.

Paul Watson

#89. The sealing industry is dying.

Paul Watson

#90. Canada I don't trust. The Canadian government hates me more than the Japanese.

Paul Watson

#91. Sea Shepherd does not condone, nor do we practise, violence.

Paul Watson

#92. Costa Rica and Germany have simply been pawns in the Japanese quest to silence Sea Shepherd in an attempt to stop our annual opposition of their illegal whaling activities.

Paul Watson

#93. My concern is not for the judicial system, but for the reality that the shark fin mafia of Costa Rica has a price on my head, and a Costa Rican prison would provide an excellent opportunity for someone to exercise this lethal contract against me.

Paul Watson

#94. I find it abhorrent to see a whale being slaughtered and do nothing but bear witness.

Paul Watson

#95. Protesting against illegal activity is not piracy.

Paul Watson

#96. Greenpeace has a fast ship that could stop the whalers cold.

Paul Watson

#97. The real strength of the environmental movement is the tens of thousands, even millions of individuals around the world who are really making a difference and they are doing it out of passion.

Paul Watson

#98. NATO isn't going to be concerned about fishing.

Paul Watson

#99. We fired pie filling. That was the Faroes. When they tried to board us, we hit them with forty-five gallon shots of custard and banana creme.

Paul Watson

#100. The seal hunt has made me ashamed to be a Canadian.

Paul Watson