Great Lakes Quotes

• Our Great Lakes, harbors, ports, and rivers provide not only vital resources for us to live, but an entire maritime way of life for so many people. The least we can do is protect it, and the way of life it provides for so many.

  Candice S. Miller

  Lakes, Rivers, People

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• We are America's Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Ocean, Swimming, Lakes

  Kurt Vonnegut (2009). “A Man Without a Country”, p.12, A&C Black

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• I should like a great lake of ale, for the King of Kings. I should like the family of heaven to be drinking it through time eternal.

  Brigit of Kildare

  Kings, Drinking, Beer

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• Born in the Flint, Michigan, big boat sailing on the Great Lakes and skiing in the winter was how most of my youth was spent.

  Doug Rice

  Winter, Lakes, Sailing

  Source: www.expatarrivals.com

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• In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Men, Lakes, Order

  "On Fredrick the Great" by Thomas B. Macaulay, 1842.

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• Indeed, if I understand this global-warming business correctly, the danger is that the waters will rise and drown the whole of Massachusetts, New York City, Long Island, the California coast and a few big cities on the Great Lakes - in other words, every Democratic enclave will be wiped out leaving only the solid Republican heartland. Politically speaking, for conservatives there's no downside to global warming.

  Mark Steyn

  New York, Business, California

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• Speech is as a pump, by which we raise and pour out the water from the great lake of Thought,--whither it flows back again.

  John Sterling

  Lakes, Water, Speech

  John Sterling (1848). “Essays and Tales: Fragments from the travels of Theodore Elbert. Thoughts. Tales and apologues”, p.155

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• As a Michigan senator, I feel a special responsibility to protect the Great Lakes. They are not only a source of clean drinking water for more than 30 million people but are also an integral part of Michigan's heritage and its economy.

  Debbie Stabenow

  Drinking, Responsibility, Lakes

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• The States which form the northern border of the United States westward from the Great Lakes to the Pacific coast include an area several times larger than France and could contain ten Englands and still have room to spare.

  John Moody

  Lakes, United States, Borders

  John Moody (1921). “The Railroad Builders: A Chronicle of the Welding of the States”

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• In the middle of Siberia I guess there's a lake that big [ like the Great Lakes], but there are practically no other lakes that big with fresh water.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Lakes, Water, Siberia

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• I grew up in a theater family. My father was a regional theater classical repertory producer. He created Shakespeare festivals. He produced all of Shakespeare's plays, mostly in Shakespeare festivals in Ohio. One of them, the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, is still going. So I grew up not wanting to be an actor, not wanting to go into the family business.

  John Lithgow

  Father, Lakes, Ohio

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Cities like Detroit exist because they occupy important sites. In the case of Detroit, it sits on a river between two great lakes - very important and strategic.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Lakes, Cities, Two

  Source: www.treehugger.com

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• Here in the Great Lakes region, a fourth year in a row of declining water levels has caused millions of dollars in losses for shipping companies, marinas and other businesses and prompted further restrictions on future water withdrawals for expanding suburbs. "A lot of people just can't believe that we may be running out of water, living this close to the Great Lakes," said Sarah Nerenberg, a water engineer with the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, which conducted the study on shortages.

  Timothy Egan

  Running, Believe, Loss

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• During the Tertiary period the whole valley of Mexico was one great lake.

  Edward Burnett Tylor

  Lakes, Valleys, Mexico

  Edward Burnett Tylor (1861). “Anahuac; Or, Mexico and the Mexicans: Ancient and Modern”, p.45

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• The United Nations has been in the Great Lakes Region and Sahel for 50 years, mostly investing in peacekeeping. NOW is the time to invest in young people!

  Babatunde Osotimehin

  Lakes, Years, People

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• When I grew up in the early '90s, the new World Wide Web felt like a gimmick, and I had no idea of the changes in store. In the summers, I'd backpack through Europe, follow the Grateful Dead. I had a car and a tent and traveled around the Great Lakes and out West. Jack Kerouac was my guiding light, his 'On the Road' a sacred text.

  Tony D'Souza

  Summer, Grateful, Europe

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• While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognitato them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Country, War, Lakes

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• I had a lot of great lakes of ignorance that I was up against, I would write what I knew in almost like islands that were rising up out of the oceans. Then I would take time off and read, sometimes for months, then I would write more of what I knew, and saw what I could see, as much as the story as I could see. And then at a certain point I had to write out what I thought was the plot because it was so hard to keep it all together in my head. And then I started to write in a more linear way.

  Rebecca Miller

  Ocean, Writing, Ignorance

  "Author Rebecca Miller Talks Male Perspective, Piecing Together a Novel, and Fly Sex in Jacob's Folly". Interview with Kayla Tanenbaum, www.glamour.com. March 11, 2013.

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• There's always been an assumption that ocean shipping coming in and out of the Great Lakes is critical to the economy. It isn't.

  John Taylor

  Ocean, Lakes, Shipping

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• If the Poe Lock were ever rendered unusable due to a terrorist attack or natural disaster, it would halt commerce on the Great Lakes and these industries would be helpless.

  Bart Stupak

  Lakes, Would Be, Locks

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• The insecticides kill the black flies, but also destroy much of the food chain for the bird, fish, and animal life which also inhabit those regions. The fish of the Great Lakes are laced with mercury from industrial plants, and fluoride from aluminum plants poisons the land and the people. Sewage from the population centers is mixed with PCBs and PBS in the watershed of the great lakes and the Finger Lakes, and the water is virtually nowhere safe for any living creatures.

  Winona LaDuke

  Animal, Lakes, Land

  Winona LaDuke (1999). “All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life”, p.17, South End Press

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• We've got this proposal which has been languishing in the legislature, the Water Legacy Act, which is derived from a Republican task force on protecting the Great Lakes. Yet nothing has been done on it.

  Jennifer Granholm

  Lakes, Water, Legacy

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