Watersheds Quotes

• Water is our most precious and interconnected natural resource. It sustains all ecosystems, communities, and economies from local watersheds to the seas. It's vital to sustaining our health, safety, and the environments in which we live and work. Simply put, water is life.

  Alexandra Cousteau

  Sea, Ecosystems, Safety

  "2014 New Year’s Resolution" by Alexandra Cousteau, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 31, 2013.

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• Rome wasn't built in a day, and the internet is our new Rome

  Kanye West

  Rome, Internet, Built

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• Rome wasn't built in a day. And neither was your body.

  Tony Horton

  Rome, Body, Built

  "I Lost A Ton Of Weight Doing A DVD Exercise Program, And It Changed My Life" by Matt Johnson, www.businessinsider.com. December 23, 2014.

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• Rome wasn't built in a day, and neit'er was Syracuse.

  Shemp Howard

  Rome, Built, Syracuse

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Watersheds come in families; nested levels of intimacy... As you work upstream toward home, you're more closely related. The big river is like your nation, a little out of hand. The lake is your cousin. The creek is your sister. The pond is her child. And, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, you're married to your sink.

  Michael Parfit

  Cousin, Children, Home

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• Every life has a watershed moment, an instant when you realize you're about to make a choice that will define everything else you ever do, and that if you choose wrong, there may not be that many things left to choose. Sometimes the wrong choice is the only one that lets you face the end with dignity, grace, and the awareness that you're doing the right thing. I'm not sure we can recognize those moments until they've passed us.

  Mira Grant

  Choices, Grace, May

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• I think the most important thing people can do is to learn about their watershed. And it's something no one knows.

  Alexandra Cousteau

  Thinking, People, Important

  "Alexandra Cousteau Tells Katie Couric, 'The Thing Every Human Has in Common Is Our Need for Water'". Interview with Katie Couric, www.glamour.com. June 28, 2010.

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• It's hard to see a river all at once, especially in the mountains. Down on the plains, rivers run in their course as straightforward as time, channeled toward the sea. But up in the headwaters, a river isn't a point where you stand. In the beginnings of the river, you teeter on the edge of a hundred tiny watersheds where one drop of water is always tipping the balance from one stream to another. History changes with each tiny event, shaping an outcome that we can only fully grasp in hindsight. And that view changes as we move farther downstream.

  Lynn Culbreath Noel

  Running, Moving, Views

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• If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

  Robert Hass

  Responsible, Places You Live, Ifs

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

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• If our salmon are not healthy, then our watersheds are not healthy-and if our watersheds our not healthy, then we have truly squandered our heritage and mortgaged our future.

  John Kitzhaber

  Rivers, Healthy, Environmental

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• Once you figure out something about the watershed, you'll find out where the schools are going to hell, and the kids aren't learning, and there is no money. Social issues, class issues, and environmental issues were all connected.

  Robert Hass

  School, Kids, Class

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

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• As costly as it was in the lives of our men and women in uniform, in military assets, and in esteem and pride, Pearl Harbor was a watershed moment for America.

  Joe Baca

  Military, Pride, Men

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• I have always been a big advocate of tap water-not because I think it harmless but because the idea of purchasing water extracted from some remote watershed and then hauled halfway round the world bothers me. Drinking bottled water relieves people of their concern about ecological threats to the river they live by or to the basins of groundwater they live over. It's the same kind of thinking that leads some to the complacent conclusion that if things on earth get bad enough, well, we'll just blast off to a space station somewhere else.

  Sandra Steingraber

  Drinking, Thinking, Rivers

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• The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard’s unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along.

  Neal Stephenson

  Gps, Ideas, Two

  Neal Stephenson (2011). “Reamde”, p.179, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• And when you learn, over the course of your life, that it's not about pleasing God, it's about learning how to trust God. That's a huge watershed, because trust is a whole different ballgame than appeasement or pleasing.

  William P. Young

  Different, Trust In God, Appeasement

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• Where does the hand become the wrist?
  where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed
  and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that
  razor's edge
  between something and nothing, between
  one and the other.

  Simon Armitage

  Hands, Doe, Weight

  Simon Armitage (2005). “The Shout: Selected Poems”, Houghton Mifflin

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• When you live in a watershed area, in a pristine area, and you could watch this whole place fall apart in front of your eyes, you don't sell your soul for a buck.

  Josh Fox

  Fall, Eye, Soul

  "“Gasland Part II”: The Fracking Empire Strikes Back". Interview with Brett Brownell, www.motherjones.com. July 8, 2013.

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• There are a couple of watersheds in human evolution. Most people are comfortable thinking about tool use and language use as watersheds. But the ability to play non-zero-sum games was another watershed.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Zero, Couple, Thinking

  Interview with Tamler Sommers, www.believermag.com. August 2005.

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• I saw Todd Bridges talk about being abused on Oprah. Something that he said, or an expression that he made that gave me that little boost I needed to be open about it and to talk about it as transparently as I did. When I told my wife, she couldn't believe it. She was petrified, because it's such a no-no, taboo, a hands-off subject. But I'd have to say hearing Todd Bridges on Oprah was my watershed moment.

  Sugar Ray Leonard

  Believe, Expression, Hands

  "Sugar Ray Leonard - "The Big Fight" Interview". Interview with Kam Williams, aalbc.com.

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• The "developed" nations had given to the "free market" the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.

  Wendell Berry

  Sacrifice, Ecosystems, Community

  Wendell Berry (2001). “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World”

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• There isn't a river or creek in the country - or there are very few - that doesn't have some small group of people working on a restoration or creek cleanup project. Let me give you one example that's a great metaphor: In Washington, D.C., there is a group called the Anacostia Watershed Society. Two rivers converge and define Washington - one which everybody knows about, the Potomac, and the Anacostia, which they don't. The Anacostia is one of the most polluted urban rivers in the country.

  Robert Hass

  Country, Two, Rivers

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

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• White nationalist, white supremacis feel like this is a watershed moment in the history of white supremacy in which something that had been cordoned off to the kind of white supremacist back waters, an idea like banning all Muslims from coming to the country is going to be .

  Chris Hayes

  Country, Ideas, White

  Source: www.msnbc.com

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• The discovery of any kind of life [in Space] at all would be a tremendous watershed moment in biology, as well as all of science.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Discovery, Space, Would Be

  Source: collider.com

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• Rome wasn't built in a day, and we won't replace fossil fuels with clean energy based on the events of a single week, either. But the important thing to remember is that, once they happen, clean energy victories are irreversible. No one will tear down wind farms because they are nostalgic for fracking in our watersheds. And nobody will pull down their solar panels because they miss having mercury in their tuna or asthma inhalers for their kids. Because once we leave fossil fuels behind, we are never going back.

  Michael Brune

  Kids, Wind Farms, Rome

  "The Road Ahead (And Some Bumps Along the Way)" by Michael Brune, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 21, 2013.

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• Is that a good definition of marking the ageing watershed? That moment when you realize - quite rationally, quite unemotionally - that the world in the not-so-distant future will not contain you: that the trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see them.

  William Boyd

  Tree, World, Growing

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