Paul Watson

Sometimes going to jail is just the price you have to pay for social reform or social change.

I feel that people should have a license to have children, that they have proper education how to raise children. And that nobody should be allowed to be a parent unless they can prove that they are competent enough to be a parent.

Most people can't see the connection between their own lives and the oceans.

I have an unexplainable belief that I will never cause harm or be harmed while at sea. Because of this, I feel secure at sea: I feel secure in the ice, I feel secure in the storms, and I feel secure in confrontations.

I've had a lot of disappointments. I think my biggest disappointment is the failure of elected officials to make good on their promises in regards to the environment or anything else, really. I have very little faith in politicians.

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.

I experienced the California Northridge Earthquake of 1994 and the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, and I have thus seen firsthand how terrible and awesomely devastating a force of nature can be.

I take a biocentric point of view. I look at things from the point of view of the Earth and the laws of ecology. As opposed to the anthropocentric point of view, where everything revolves around humanity.

People are beginning to realize that we need to live in accordance with the law of ecology, the law of finite resources, and if we don't, we're going to go extinct.

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.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society recognizes that the deaths of four sealers is a tragedy, but Sea Shepherd also recognizes that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of seal pups is an even greater tragedy.

The tragedy is that there is so much more incentive - money - to destroy the ecology than there is to preserve it.