Peter Benchley Quotes

As a young boy, I was very interested - as I still am - in all sorts of adventure and exploration. I thought about being an astronaut, a dinosaur scientist, or marine biologist, but I clearly was drawn to the ocean and to the water.

I am an underwater explorer, not a treasure hunter.

I love storytelling, I love being a visual person, and it just made perfect sense to be an underwater photographer and explore the ocean and work with scientists.

I had gone to school to study marine biology.

I think I have the best job in the world. Seventy-one percent of the planet is covered by water, we've explored less than five percent of the ocean, and there are so many fabulous discoveries that have yet to be made.

People love the ocean. People are always asking me why I don't study the ocean, because, after all, I live in Hawaii. I tell them that it's because the ocean is a lonely, empty place.

When I was a little kid, I always wanted to be an oceanographer.

I want to be a scientist who studies the ocean when I grow up. I would go out to sea, and scuba dive, and find new things, and National Geographic will hire me.” Sure, Nudge. Probably around the time I become president.

If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years.

I am really dedicated to understanding the planet/creature on which we live and know that means I must go beneath the sea to see 72 percent of what is going on.

When I was a kid, Jacques Cousteau was my hero and the person who inspired me to become an underwater explorer. I have many other people who inspired me after him, but he is still my all-time hero.

The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there's an alien world here on Earth.

Like my father and grandfather, Philippe and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, I've dedicated my life to exploring and protecting our seas, in large part through documentary film.

I'm friends with James Cameron. We've spent time together over the years because he is a diver and explorer and in his heart of hearts a biologist. We run into each other at scientific conferences.

The amazing thing about the sea is that it is perhaps the last truly unexplored frontier; most oceanographers estimate that only about ninety-five per cent of the sea has been studied. Meanwhile, the oceans are believed to contain more animals than exist on land, a majority of which have never been discovered.

In the spring of 1996, I was working for Nickelodeon on a show called 'Rocko's Modern Life,' and I was interested at the time in doing a show about the ocean, an undersea show.

There is another domain that we consider relevant and having good prospects - marine biology. For many years this region [Russian Far East] has been home for one of the leading institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Marine Biology.

The quickest way to destroy ocean science is to take human explorers out of the water

There is an enormous amount to be learned about the sea; like most wildernesses, it has great potential.

Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water, and there's so much we can be doing with oceans, and it was one of the frontiers that people have more or less abandoned.

The oceans have been a part of my life for as long as I remember. As a child, I spent hours playing in the surf off Cape Cod. In college, I fished along the rocky coast of Nova Scotia with my school's fishing team.

The earliest memories I have of the ocean are actually stories - stories from my grandfather, the legendary ocean explorer and conservationist Jacques Cousteau. My passion for ocean conservation stems from learning at a very young age that we're all connected; we're all in this together.

I just was mesmerized by all of this life everywhere I looked. And so I wanted to be a marine biologist.

Frankly, we should have an ARPA-O, an Advanced Research Projects Agency for oceans research, to match DARPA for defense and ARPA-E for energy. And we should have an Oceans and Coasts Fund to match the upland- and freshwater-directed Land and Water Conservation Fund.

I have been passionate about the oceans since I dipped my toes in the water at the first age of three.