We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.
— Thomas Fuller
Unbelievable Ocean Conservation quotations
The oceans deserve our respect and care, but you have to know something before you can care about it.

Our past, our present, and whatever remains of our future, absolutely depend on what we do now.

Why is it that scuba divers and surfers are some of the strongest advocates of ocean conservation? Because they've spent time in and around the ocean, and they've personally seen the beauty, the fragility, and even the degradation of our planet's blue heart.
I had fought on behalf of man against the sea, but I realized that it had become more urgent to fight on behalf of the sea against men.
The wars of the twenty-first century will be fought over water.

Without water, our planet would be one of the billions of lifeless rocks floating endlessly in the vastness of the inky-black void.
I hope that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet.
It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist: the threat is rather to life itself.

Many of us ask what can I, as one person, do, but history shows us that everything good and bad starts because somebody does something or does not do something.
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.
We know that when we protect our oceans we're protecting our future.

We're [Ocean Conservancy group] trying to convince people it's a bad idea to catch fish faster than they can reproduce. That should be a duh, but it's still going on.
Unfortunately, there's a big, bad new bully threatening ocean animals, climate change. We might save fish only to have them starve because of climate change. It seems like the problems just won't stop. That's what got me to quit my cushy University job and take a big pay cut to work on conservation.
Throughout history, men have tried to play God by moving rabbits, goats, sparrows, mongooses, and a hundred other species to oceanic islands and island continents, and later have wished to God they hadn't.

For a modern ruler the laws of conservation and transformation of energy, when the vivifing stream takes its source, the ways it wends its course in nature, and how, under wisdom and knowledge, it may be intertwined with human destiny, instead of careering headlong to the ocean, are a study at least as pregnant with consequences to life as any lesson taught by the long unscientific history of man.
Individuals of all ages can make an important difference in the overall health of our ocean by the actions they take every day. Simple things like picking up trash on the beach, recycling and conserving water can have a big impact on the health of our ocean.