Paul Watson Quotes

The shark is the apex predator in the sea.

Sharks have molded evolution for 450 million years. All fish species that are prey to the sharks have had their behavior, their speed, their camouflage, their defense mechanisms molded by the shark.

In the great scheme of things, what matters is not how long you live but why you live, what you stand for and what you are willing to die for.

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

We buy a bottle of water in the city, where clean water comes out in its taps.

You know, back in 1965, if someone said to the average person, You know in thirty years you are going to buy water in plastic bottles and pay more for that water than for gasoline? Everybody would look at you like youre completely out of your mind.

We're just a conceited, naked ape. But in our minds we're some sort of "divine legend," and we see ourselves as some sort of god. That we can walk around the earth deciding who will live and who will die and what will be destroyed and what will be saved. But the fact is we're just a bunch of primates out of control.

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

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

This is the contradiction we have in the media.

We love vigilantes: Batman, Tarzan, Green Arrow - the comic books and the TV shows are filled with vigilantes. We love to promote it. Jesus Christ was a vigilante. We admire these people, but we don't want to be associated with them.

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.

They [Greenpeace] forgot their original purpose and turned into a big, rich bureaucracy, more interested in fund-raising than in saving lives, so I got fed up and quit... they're a bunch of wimps.

The tragedy is that there is so much more incentive - money - to destroy the ecology than there is to preserve it.

I do what I do because it is the right thing to do.

I am a warrior, and it is the way of the warrior to fight superior odds.

Musicians have the power to influence people and along with movie makers, they can reach and influence more people than any group of people, more than scientists and certainly more than politicians.

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

Well lose more species of plants and animals between 2000 and 2065 than weve lost in the last 65 million years. If we dont find answers to these problems, were gonna be victims of this extinction event that were at fault for.

Social change comes through people.

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.

Immigration is one of the leading contributors to population growth.

We are killing our host the planet Earth.

... I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the 'AIDS of the Earth.' I make no apologies for that statement.... We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.

You can't love nature with a gun

All consumption should be local. No food products need to be transported over hundreds of miles to market. All commercial fishing should be abolished. If local communities need to fish the fish should be caught individually by hand. We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles.

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

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.

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

We need to stop burning fossil fuels and utilize only wind, water, and solar power with all generation of power coming from individual or small community units like windmills, waterwheels, and solar panels. Sea transportation should be by sail...Air transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary.

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.

Back in 1980, whale watching surpassed whaling as an industry.

Now it's worth about four times as much. Whale watching provides far, far more jobs to people than whaling ever did. Whale watching has become an ally in the fight to end whaling.

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

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

All of the great whales are endangered.

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

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

In other words, people should be placed in parks within ecosystems instead of parks placed in human communities. We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference. We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.

We have intelligent species on our planet that we are not even trying to communicate with.

We should not be living in human communities that enclose tiny preserved ecosystems within them. Human communities should be maintained in small population enclaves within linked wilderness ecosystems. No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas. Communication systems can link the communities.

They [Japanese whalers] haven't produced a single peer-reviewed international scientific paper in 23 years.

We are literally eating the oceans alive and there are simply not enough fish to continue to feed an ever expanding population of humanity.

North American cats eat more fish than all the world's seals put together, yet we lay the blame on the seals for the declining fish stocks.

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

Musicians have made incredible contributions to the conservation and environmental movement and continue to do so, more than ever.

There is a lack of economic and political motivation to defend life in the oceans. The profit is made by companies exploiting the oceans and they have the money to buy the politicians who make the laws.

We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion. We need to eliminate nationalism and tribalism and become Earthlings. And as Earthlings, we need to recognize that all the other species that live on this planet are also fellow citizens and also Earthlings. This is a planet of incredible diversity of life-forms; it is not a planet of one species as many of us believe.

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

It's funny but when young people say to me "what can I study to be a force for change, should I study law or biology or business?" My answer is music, drama, journalism, communications.

We don't give a damn what you or anybody else on this planet thinks. We didn't sink those ships for you. We did it for the whales.

I can't think of a greater legacy than, "Because you lived, another species survived."

Everybody is a hypocrite. You can't live on this planet without being a hypocrite.

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

The Ady Gil, a Sea Shepherd vessel, it's a fast patrol boat, was sitting still in the water when the Shonan Maru #2 came by, deliberately turned into it, rammed it, cut it in half, sunk it and destroyed it.