Whaling Quotes

1. "Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience."
Author: Carl Clinton Van Doren

2. "One question that especially intrigues me is exactly when humpbacks started coming to Hawaii and why. In artwork and oral histories of ancient Hawaiians there is no record of humpback whales being there, and there is no evidence that humpbacks were there in large numbers in the mid-1800's during the heyday of whaling. The whalers who provisioned in Hawaii in the winter couldn't have overlooked the numbers of whales that are in Hawaii now. We really don't know what happened, but everything points to a recent colonization of humpbacks. (p.162)."
Author: Charles Flip Nicklin

3. "The next day, William Lanney's much abused remains were carried in a coffin to the cemetery. The crowd of mourners was large. It included many of Lanney's shipmates, suggesting that the whaling profession in late-nineteenth-century Hobart was graced with a higher level of humanistic sensibility than the surgical profession."
Author: David Quammen

4. "We commend President Obama and his administration for taking this strong action against Iceland and its barbaric whaling industry... and we urge the President to take similar action against Japan and Norway as well!"
Author: Hayden Panettiere

5. "Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in faces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment."
Author: Herman Melville

6. "There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner - for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable. (Moby Dick chap 35 p 153)"
Author: Herman Melville

7. "Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being."
Author: Herman Melville

8. "Go on a whaling voyage; this"
Author: Herman Melville

9. "Besides all those whaling details, Moby Dick is about someone who's looking for something so huge, something they've wanted all their life, yet they know when they find it, it will kill them."
Author: Laurie Anderson

10. "I pictured the mother whale, exhausted from labor, pushing her calf up to the skin of the water. The miracle of breath in the face of predation, life in the wake of whaling ships."
Author: Megan Mayhew Bergman

11. "Whaling was the oil business of its day."
Author: Nathaniel Philbrick

12. "In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks. So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America, and sold. In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today. Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter, and the destruction of wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics. -"
Author: Peter Singer

13. "The Kappamaki, a whaling research ship, was currently researching the question: How many whales can you catch in one week?"
Author: Terry Pratchett

Whaling Quotes Pictures