Top 28 Whaling Quotes & Sayings

When a chainsaw rips into a 2,000 year old redwood tree, it's ripping into my guts. When a bulldozer plows through the Amazon rainforest, it's ripping through my side. And when a Japanese whaling ship fires an exploding harpoon into a great whale it's my heart that's being blown to smithereens.

The real threat to whales is whaling, which has endangered many whale species.

I grew up in a whaling town. We didn't stop whaling in Australia until 1978. And I've always lived in fishing communities. You could say I'm from the Redneck Wing of marine conservation. Everything I know about the sea I learnt at the end of a spear or a hook. Seems weird to admit it, but I hunted and killed my way to enlightenment. Eventually you see where you've been. All the traces you leave are gaps and absences. And it's a sick feeling, knowing you might bequeath a full dose of Nothing to those who come after you.

In December 2012, the U.S. 9th district court granted a temporary injunction to the Japanese whalers that ordered the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society U.S.A. to not approach within 500 yards of the whaling vessels.

We've got a yawl named the Phebe, which is named for a boat in a whaling journal my father and I edited. We keep a copy of the journal on board.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Biarritz was a community of whalers. During the Middle Ages, it had grown from a small fishing village into a profitable whaling industry. Whale oil was liquid gold to these sea-faring folk.

We commend President Obama and his administration for taking this strong action against Iceland and its barbaric whaling industry... and we urge the President to take similar action against Japan and Norway as well!

The only language that the Japanese whaling industry understands is economics.

I get as much fun as the next man from whaling the ball as hard as I can and catching it squarely on the button. But from sad experience I learned not to try this in a round that meant anything.

The fact is, Japan's whaling is illegal, so just because there is a natural disaster in Japan is no reason for us to stop opposing their illegal activities in the Southern Ocean.

On my second swim at Deception Island, the water was very clear and I was looking at hundreds of whale bones beneath me. It was a graveyard from the whaling some time in the 1920s-30s.

Whaling was the oil business of its day.

Way back in October 2007, I had urged thousands of Australians to vote for Kevin Rudd and Peter Garrett's Labor Party. Why? Because they promised to get tough on illegal Japanese whaling.

scientific whaling, and other lies will be exposed and become atrocities of the past.

Costa Rica and Germany have simply been pawns in the Japanese quest to silence Sea Shepherd in an attempt to stop our annual opposition of their illegal whaling activities.

Does Greenpeace think it can stop whaling in Antarctica by publicly eating whale meat and declaring it delicious? What are these people thinking?

Too much detail can bog down any story. Enough with the history of gunpowder, the geology of Hawaii, the processes of whaling, and cactus and tumbleweed.

It is of great importance to our country generally, and especially to our navigating and whaling interests, that the Pacific Coast and, indeed, the whole of our territory west of the Rocky Mountains, should speedily be filled up by a hardy and patriotic population.

The Kappamaki, a whaling research ship, was currently researching the question: How many whales can you catch in one week?

Back in 1980, whale watching surpassed whaling as an industry. Now it's worth about four times as much. Whale watching provides far, far more jobs to people than whaling ever did. Whale watching has become an ally in the fight to end whaling.

Pete Bethune is a hero in New Zealand. He's a hero worldwide to people who want to see the end of whaling.

I was very lucky. I was just finishing my PhD at Cambridge in 1981. This opportunity came up because whaling was drawing to an end. There was the prospect of a moratorium, and one of the arguments that was brought up, especially by Japanese whalers, was that, if we didn't have whaling, we would know nothing of whales. All the science depends on having dead animals, they argued, so that's one of the benefits of the whaling industry.

When it comes to whaling, Iceland is an international outlaw. Years of global negotiations and declarations have failed utterly to end its illegal slaughter of whales. It's time to send Iceland a message it can't ignore: trade sanctions.

Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.

Besides all those whaling details, Moby Dick is about someone who's looking for something so huge, something they've wanted all their life, yet they know when they find it, it will kill them.

And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of ; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone ; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

Putting Zodiacs in front of whaling vessels doesn't do it anymore. Done that, been there, seen that.

The Brer Rabbit ploy has been quite effective for me. When a country is talking about prosecuting me, I demand to be charged and put on trial and offer to pay my own airfare. They know that I'm going to bring a lot of international media with me and put their whaling programme on trial, and they decide it's better to keep quiet and do nothing.