With time, and enough water, all things are possible.

–Leonardo da Vinci

With the towers, we’re doing the same thing nature does. All pollution sooner or later gets rained out of the air and ends up in the ocean. We short-circuit the process. We pick up pollution in the towers and put it in the ocean sooner, so people don’t have to breathe it.

–Dr. M. L. Pruett

The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.

–British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward in an interview with The Guardian on May 13, 2010

I turned on my back and floated, looking up at the sky, nothing around me but cool clear Pacific, nothing in my eyes but long blue space. It was as close as I ever got to cleanliness and freedom, as far as I ever got from all the people. They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through the mountains, cut down a thousand years of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn’t touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn’t be tainted.

There was nothing wrong with southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure.

–Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool (1950)

Harry: are you an idiot or what?

–unidentified woman to a man standing on a dead, floating whale trying to pet a shark eating that whale, July 2001

Roll on, thou deep dark blue ocean – roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth with ruin – his control

Stops with the shore.

–George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818)