Jacques-Yves Cousteau Quotes & Sayings

Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

If human civilization is going to invade the waters of the earth, then let it be first of all to carry a message of respect. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

How dangerous are those sea animals with bad reputations? A few actually kill. A few maim. Some are poisonous when eaten by man. Most sting, stab,or poison and cause mild to severe discomfort to man. Yet man is one of the larger beings that sea creatures encounter, and these poisons usually can't kill him. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

I am not a scientist. I am, rather, an impresario of scientists. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Under water, man becomes an archangel. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

I experimented with all possible maneuvers-loops, somersaults and barrel rolls. I stood upside down on one finger and burst out laughing, a shrill, distorted laugh. Nothing I did altered the automatic rhythm of the air. Delivered from gravity and buoyancy, I flew around in space. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The United Nation's goal is to reduce population selectively by encouraging abortion, forced sterilization, and control of human reproduction, and regards two-thirds of the human population as excess baggage, with 350,000 people to be eliminated per day. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

A lot of people attack the sea, I make love to it. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The awareness of our environment came progressively in all countries with different outlets. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The best way to observe a fish is to become a fish. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

We know how to organize warfare, but do we know how to act when confronted with peace? — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Through the window of my mask I see a wall of coral, its surface a living kaleidoscope of lilac flecks, splashes of gold, reddish streaks and yellows, all tinged by the familiar transparent blue of the sea. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Our society is turning toward more and more needless consumption. It is a vicious circle that I compare to cancer ... Should we eliminate suffering, diseases? The idea is beautiful, but perhaps not a benefit for the long term. We should not allow our dread of diseases to endanger the future of our species ... In order to stabilize world population, we need to eliminate 350,000 people a day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

With earth's burgeoning human population to feed we must turn to the sea with understanding and new technology. We need to farm it as we farm the land. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

We must go and see for ourselves. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers. Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

There is about as much educational benefit to be gained in studying dolphins in captivity as there would be studying mankind by only observing prisoners held in solitary confinement — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

May this continent, the last explored by humankind, be the first one to be spared by humankind. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

However fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

In the deep space of the sea I have found my moon — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

I was playing when I invented the aqualung. I think play is the most serious thing in the world. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The future of nutrition is found in the oceans — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job is to salvage Mother Nature. We are facing a formidable enemy in this field. It is the hunters ... and to convince them to leave their guns on the wall is going to be very difficult. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

I am absolutely enraptured by the atmosphere of a wreck. A dead ship is the house of a tremendous amount of life-fish and plants. The mixture of life and death is mysterious, even religious. There is the same sense of peace and mood that you feel on entering a cathedral. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The impossible missions are the only ones which succeed. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Sometime we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and run headlong down an immutable course — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

I believe that national sovereignties will shrink in the face of universal interdependence. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

All life is part of a complex relationship in which each is dependent upon the others, taking from, giving to and living with all the rest. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Without ethics, everything happens as if we were all five billion passengers on a big machinery and nobody is driving the machinery. And it's going faster and faster, but we don't know where. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

I swam across the rocks and compared myself favorably with the sars. To swim fishlike, horizontally, was the logical method in a medium eight hundred times denser than air. To halt and hang attached to nothing, no lines or air pipe to the surface, was a dream. At night I had often had visions of flying by extending my arms as wings. Now I flew without wings. (Since that first aqualung flight, I have never had a dream of flying.) — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

There are no boundaries in the real Planet Earth. No United States, no Soviet Union, no China, no Taiwan ... Rivers flow unimpeded across the swaths of continents. The persistent tides - the pulse of the sea - do not discriminate; they push against all the varied shores on Earth. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short-term thinking. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

And let us remember too that life, in its exuberance, always succeeds in overflowing the narrow limits within which man thinks he can confine it. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The biggest obstacle was mixing abortion with overpopulation. These are two things that have nothing to do with each other. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The Sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

A common denominator in every single nuclear accident - a nuclear plant or on a nuclear submarine - is that before the specialists even know what has happened, they rush to the media saying, 'There's no danger to the public.' They do this before they themselves know what has happened because they are terrified that the public might react violently, either by panic or by revolt. — Jacques-Yves 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. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

It is fashionable nowadays to talk about the endless riches of the sea. The ocean is regarded as a sort of bargain basement, but I don't agree with that estimate. People don't realize that water in the liquid state is very rare in the universe. Away from earth it is usually a gas. This moisture is a blessed treasure, and it is our basic duty, if we don't want to commit suicide, to preserve it. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

There was wildlife, untouched, a jungle at the border of the sea, never seen by those who floated on the opaque roof. Describing his early experience, in 1936, when a fellow naval officer, Philippe Tailliez, gave him goggles to see below the Mediterranean Sea surface. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Perhaps the time has come to formulate a moral code which would govern our relations with the great creatures of the sea as well as with those on dry land. That this will come to pass is my dear wish. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The idea of a group of elders is that, in past civilizations, they have linked worlds; the other world was also present in this one. There is also the argument that elders have "experience." The problem is that experience teaches fear of change. Experience kills imagination. Experience makes people conservative. What we are facing tomorrow requires the force of imagination, not wisdom from yesterday. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

People protect what they love. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 per day. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The sea is not a bargain basement. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

In order to save the planet it would be necessary to kill 350,000 people per day. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The reason I love the sea I cannot explain - it's physical. When you dive you begin to feel like an angel. It's a liberation of your weight. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

When we return wild animals to nature, we merely return them to what is already theirs. For man cannot give wild animals freedom, they can only take it away. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The future is in the hands of those who explore ... and from all the beauty they discover while crossing perpetually receding frontiers, they develop for nature and for humankind an infinite love. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

I wake up saying, I'm still alive; a miracle. And so I keep on pushing. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Man, of all the animals, is probably the only one to regard himself as a great delicacy. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The sea is the universal sewer. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

If we were logical, the future would be bleak, indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau