Best 169 quotes of Sylvia Earle on MyQuotes

All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class - which wasn't such a bad deal.

America gains most when individuals have great freedom to pursue personal goals without undue government interference.

Any astronaut can tell you you've got to do everything you can to learn about your life support system and then do everything you can to take care of it.

As a child, I was aware of the widely-held attitude that the ocean is so big, so resilient that we could use the sea as the ultimate place to dispose of anything we did not want, from garbage and nuclear wastes to sludge from sewage to entire ships that had reached the end of their useful life.

Burning fossil fuels has given us the gift of seeing ourselves in new ways. But that very gift now enables us to see we've got to change our ways.

Childcare is a huge issue for young women whose work may require them to leave their families for weeks at a time.

Earth as an ecosystem stands out in the all of the universe. There's no place that we know about that can support life as we know it, not even our sister planet, Mars, where we might set up housekeeping someday, but at great effort and trouble we have to recreate the things we take for granted here.

Eating wildlife is probably not the smartest thing that we can do in terms of maintaining the integrity of natural systems.

Even if you never have the chance to see or touch the ocean, the ocean touches you with every breath you take, every drop of water you drink, every bite you consume. Everyone, everywhere is inextricably connected to and utterly dependent upon the existence of the sea.

Even our rules and regulations, our laws, our policies, favor the destructive nature of taking too much from the ocean and using techniques that are horribly destructive. We know they don't work. We know it's not sustainable.

Everybody can make choices that will make peace with the natural world.

Every time I slip into the ocean, it's like going home.

Far and away, the greatest threat to the ocean, and thus to ourselves, is ignorance. But we can do something about that.

Fish from all over the world, from deep in the sea, wind up in countries from Germany to Japan. That is just crazy.

For humans, the Arctic is a harshly inhospitable place, but the conditions there are precisely what polar bears require to survive - and thrive. 'Harsh' to us is 'home' for them. Take away the ice and snow, increase the temperature by even a little, and the realm that makes their lives possible literally melts away.

Fortunately, we know more about the problems that we have than in all preceding history. We know now the consequences of the things that we put into the air, into the water - of the way we treat life on Earth.

Forty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It's agriculture. It's golf courses. It's domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the gulf.

Give the ocean a break. Give yourself a break.

Great attention gets paid to rainforests because of the diversity of life there. Diversity in the oceans is even greater.

'Green' issues at last are attracting serious attention, owing to critically important links between the environment and the economy, health, and our security.

Historically, girls have not been encouraged to be scientists, to be explorers, and there's a social kind of constraint, of course. Having the responsibility, a disproportionate part of the responsibility, for caring for families, caring for children. I know this challenge from firsthand experience because I have three children and four grandsons.And some of the time I have spent as a scientist and as an explorer has meant choosing to not be with my children and grandchildren as much as I might otherwise have done had I not been a scientist, an explorer.

Humans are the only creatures with the ability to dive deep in the sea, fly high in the sky, send instant messages around the globe, reflect on the past, assess the present and imagine the future.

I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don't see in the daytime.

I am driven by what I know; that the world I love is in trouble.

Ice ages have come and gone. Coral reefs have persisted.

If Darwin could get into a submarine and see what I've seen, thousand of feet beneath the ocean, I am just confident that he would be inspired to sit down and start writing all over again.

If Darwin could see what we now see, what we now know about the ocean, about the atmosphere, about the nature of life, as we now understand it, about the importance of microbes - I think he would just beam with joy that many of the thoughts and the glimpses of the majesty of life on Earth that he had during his life, now magnified many times over.

If somebody dumps something noxious in my back yard, the dumper is the last one I would call on to repair the damage.

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

If we have a hope of really understanding our place in nature and of carving out a place for ourselves that is sustainable, it's primarily because of the new level of communication. It used to be, 'What you don't have in your mind, you have on your shelf.' But now we have the Web.

If you make the choice to just go with the flow, that is a choice to make a difference in a negative way.

If you think the ocean isn't important, imagine Earth without it. Mars comes to mind. No ocean, no life support system.

Ignorance is the biggest problem of all for the ocean - and for many other things as well.

I have lots of heroes: anyone and everyone who does whatever they can to leave the natural world better than they found it.

I hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and, in so doing, secure hope for humankind. Health to the ocean means health for us.

I hope that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet.

I love music of all kinds, but there's no greater music than the sound of my grandchildren laughing; my kids, too.

I'm haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls 'tomorrow's child,' asking why we didn't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time. Well, now is that time.

I'm not against extracting a modest amount of wildlife out of the ocean for human consumption, but I am really concerned about the large-scale industrial fishing that engages in destructive practices like trawling and longlining.

In terms of personal choices, let's all think more carefully about where we get our protein from.

In the past few decades, Earth's natural systems have endured more pressure than in all preceding human history.

I personally have stopped eating seafood.

Ironically the very energy, the very basis of how we know what we know, has been reliant on having an energy source [necessary] to build rockets to go to the moon and Mars, to support airplanes that fly, and satellites to give us our communication.

I suggest to everyone: Look in the mirror. Ask yourself: Who are you? What are your talents? Use them, and do what you love.

It doesn't matter where on Earth you live, everyone is utterly dependent on the existence of that lovely, living saltwater soup. There's plenty of water in the universe without life, but nowhere is there life without water.

It has taken these many hundreds of millions of years to fine-tune the Earth to a point where it is suitable for the likes of us.

It is not too late to turn things around.

It isn't too late to shift from the swift, sharp decline of ocean systems in recent decades to an era of steady recovery. There is time, and there is a growing awareness, which is the best way to counter indifference. People who know might care.

It's a fact of life that there will be oil spills, as long as oil is moved from place to place, but we must have provisions to deal with them, and a capability that is commensurate with the size of the oil shipments.

It's an appreciation for life generally, every bit of life, the smallest creature that lives in the intestines of termites that make termite life possible - to the leaves that turn out oxygen and grab carbon dioxide and with water make simple sugars that feed much of the world. I mean, these are everyday miracles.