Edith Widder Quotes

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.

My grandfather was Jacques Cousteau, a pioneer of ocean exploration and the co-inventor of scuba diving. Back in the 1940s when he tested out his invention which allowed humans to swim freely in the ocean with a portable air source for the first time in history, very little of the ocean had been explored let alone captured on film.

I have photographed sharks in waters around the globe, and I always want more and yearn to peer deeper into their world. To feed my passion and to raise awareness, I developed a story about sharks for 'National Geographic' magazine.

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.

Scientists are always the ones who head into the ocean, but I want to take writers and politicians, people who can convey the beauty that is there and perhaps do something to take care of it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jacques Cousteau was my hero.

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.

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

Since writing JAWS, I've been lucky enough to do close to forty television shows about wildlife in the oceans, and yes, I have been attacked by sea creatures once in a while.

Every time you dive, you hope you'll see something new - some new species. Sometimes the ocean gives you a gift, sometimes it doesn't.

I'm a big diver. I like to dive when I travel, and my last dive was in the Galapagos. I used to live in San Francisco and I would dive all the time in Monterey.

I grew up down in Florida, and in the Keys, there's this place called Sea Camp which was not unlike Space Camp, except you explored the sea. And so that kind of whetted my appetite for that. But then I ended up swimming in a lagoon full of Cassiopeia jellyfish, and that quickly quashed that desire to be a marine biologist.

We've only explored about 5% 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 we can't even imagine.

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.

My clients are the whales and the seals.

Nobody can legitimately claim to be a marine ecologist and conservationist while continuing to eat fish. It is the ultimate form of hypocrisy.

I want to stay in the ocean. I'm not going to be able to do that from some holding cell in Japan.

It’s all in there. We have harpooned every whale in the ocean.

I developed my camera system, called the Medusa, jointly with a colleague down in Australia as a method of exploring the ocean unobtrusively. The critical thing was that we didn't use white light, which I believe has been scaring the animals away.

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