“Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They're beautiful―God, how beautiful they are! They're like an impossibly perfect piece of machinery. They're as graceful as any bird. They're as mysterious as any animal on earth. No one knows for sure how long they live or what impulses―except for hunger―they respond to. There are more than two hundred and fifty species of shark, and everyone is different from every other one.”

“Life's full of chances to hurt yourself or someone else.”

“Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth.”

“We do not just fear our predators, we are transfixed by them. We are prone to weave stories and fables and chat endlessly about them.”

“If we choose to walk into a forest where a tiger lives, we are taking a chance. If we swim in a river where crocodiles live, we are taking a chance. If we visit the desert or climb a mountain or enter a swamp where snakes have managed to survive, we are taking a chance.”

“We provoke a shark every time we enter the water where sharks happen to be, for we forget: The ocean is not our territory - it's theirs.”

“We are already perilously close to killing off the top of the oceanic food chain - with catastrophic consequences that we can't begin to imagine. Let us not, in the heat of anger, reduce the already devastated population of great white sharks by one more member.”

“In a deeply tribal sense, we love our monsters, and I think that is the key to it right there. It is monsters; it is learning about them: it is both thrill and safety. You can think of them without being desperately afraid because they are not going to come into your living room and eat you. That is 'Jaws.'”

“Without sharks, you take away the apex predator of the ocean, and you destroy the entire food chain.”

“If man doesn't learn to treat the oceans and the rain forest with respect, man will become extinct.”

“It is not that I don't have a fear of sharks, it is that I have a respect for them, so that I know any more than if I were to go into the jungle, I would have a fear of tigers, that I would try to lower the odds.”