Jacques-Yves Cousteau

"Sylvia Earle, though a great scientist, is also the heir to Jacques Cousteau, inducting the landbound among us into the mysteries of the sea, helping us to feel both astonished and at ease."

"From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free."

"Buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction — up, down, sideways — by merely flipping his hand. Under water, man becomes an archangel."

"The sea is the universal sewer."

"We must plant the sea and herd its animals … using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about — farming replacing hunting."

"Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians."

"If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed — if we are not willing — we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect."

"What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on."

"Man, of all the animals, is probably the only one to regard himself as a great delicacy."

"I am not a scientist. I am, rather, an impresario of scientists."

"The glory of nature provides evidence that God exists"

"I said that the oceans were sick but they're not going to die. There is no death possible in the oceans — there will always be life — but they're getting sicker every year."

"In the last few decades, a terribly pernicious rumor has been circulated by the press. It claims, exhibiting a level of stupidity heretofore considered impossible, that a human being could crawl through the arteries of a blue whale. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. I do not know why this deleterious rumor has been systematically repeated, but its very existence is an ugly cancer upon the face of science."

"We have to prepare for what life could become in 40 years. We need to outline what is possible and what is impossible with the non-renewable resources of the Earth. What role will technological improvement play? Taking all this into account, what kind of life can we produce in the best way for 10 billion people? That's a problem that needs to be solved."

"Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and turn headlong down an immutable course."

"Sylvia Earle's generation — they were explorers...They’re like, what is even down there? How do we understand this? And then: Oh [bleep], this is in trouble. And they all became conservationists, right? We saw that same professional transformation with Jacques Cousteau."

""It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable." (Übersetzung: "Es ist schrecklich, das sagen zu müssen. Die Weltbevölkerung muss stabilisiert werden, und dafür müssten wir täglich 350.000 Menschen eliminieren. Es ist so unvorstellbar daran zu denken, dass wir das eigentlich nicht sagen sollten. Aber unsere Gesamtsituation ist beklagenswert.") Interview mit Bahgat Elnadi und Adel Rifaat, "UNESCO Courier", November 1991 p. 13"