Graham Hawkes Quotes

Our oceans cover two-thirds of what my grandfather called our water planet, and the part of the ocean that falls under the jurisdiction of the United States covers an area larger than the country itself.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

The seas are the heart's blood of the earth.

I have always had a very natural connection to the water, and that connection stems from the ocean itself.

There is so much life underneath the water that we don't know about.

The sea is a place where every day, half the population eats the other half.

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.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.

I love the Gulf of Mexico.

This is part of what's driving me, is this feeling like there's so much yet to be discovered in the oceans, and we're destroying it before we even know what's in it.

We've only explored about five percent of our ocean. There are great discoveries yet to be made down there, fantastic creatures representing millions of years of evolution and possibly bioactive compounds that could benefit us in ways that we can't even yet imagine.

In 2010, there was a TED event called Mission Blue held aboard the Lindblad Explorer in the Galapagos as part of the fulfillment of Sylvia Earle's TED wish. I spoke about a new way of exploring the ocean, one that focuses on attracting animals instead of scaring them away.

There's too much we don't know about the ocean to make me feel comfortable around it.

I fell in love with the ocean when I was just a little kid, four or five years old, I was a junior ranger, I was going out and doing intertidal stuff, walking around and sticking my finger in my first sea anemone and picking up starfish and all that. It gripped me when I was young.

It goes back to the starfish. That's when the light bulb really popped over my head. We'd found one on the beach, and I was struck by what astonishing creatures they are, talking with Dad about how they regenerate.

I am delighted to see that the issue of coral reefs is receiving the attention it deserves.

I just kind of figured that the marine biology would be a career, and the art would be something I did for my own self-expression.

It's harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1,000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done.

I learned to dive in Belize, which is sort of like learning to drive in an Aston Martin. The reefs and refuges are some of the most dramatic in the world. But the real reason I went was to dive the Blue Hole, a 400 ft. sinkhole near Ambergris Caye. Google it, and you'll see why.

Jacques Cousteau was my hero.

I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was growing up and always wanted to be surrounded by wildlife.

The ocean is very comfortable. I could never live inland.

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.

Everybody's got some fascination with undersea life, don't you think?

I studied marine biology, even taught marine science before I got into animation, so I had an interest in that field and those animals.