Robert Ballard Quotes

Follow your own passion - not your parents', not your teachers' - yours.

I would not let an adult drive my robot. You don't have enough gaming experience. But I will let a kid with no license take control of my vehicle system.

I would have to say my favorite place on Earth is Bora Bora.

Remember to always dream. More importantly, work hard to make those dreams come true and never give up.

I can't travel without Sudoku.

There's a long list of technologies that have now made it possible to carry out very precise search efforts in the deep sea.

Everything I'm going to present to you was not in my textbooks when I went to school ... not even in my college textbooks. I'm a geophysicist, and [in] all my Earth science books when I was a student - I had to give the wrong answer to get an A.

It is a quiet and peaceful place - and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest.

I'm a geophysicist and all my earth science books when I was a student, I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at. We learned of Marshall Kay's geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap.

You can only inspire when you give people a new way of looking at the world in which they live.

What drives me is exploration with a purpose, more the classic Royal Geographical Society genre.

I believe in just enriching the economy. And we're leaving so much on the table, 72 percent of the planet.

Great is the person who plants a tree knowing he will never sit under it.

I love all of the Earth.

My final question: Why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea? Why do we have programs to build a habitation on Mars and we have programs to look at colonizing the Moon but we do not have a program looking at how we colonize our own planet, and the technology is at hand!

So, you know, I think the age of exploration is just beginning, not ending, on our planet.

The deep sea is the largest museum on earth, it contains more history than all the museums on land combined, and yet we're only now penetrating it.

I prefer sayings over jokes.

I am an underwater explorer, not a treasure hunter.

There are more active volcanoes beneath the sea than on land by two orders of magnitude.

I mean, there is amazing amount of oil and gas and other resources out beneath the sea. It's staggering.

Forever may it remain that way. And may God bless these now-found souls.

Well, when I was a kid, I grew up in San Diego next to the ocean. The ocean was my friend - my best friend.

The body is sort of a pain. It has to go to the bathroom. It has to be comfortable. But the spirit is indestructible. It can move at the speed of light.

If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years.

Most of the time you are growing up, people tell you what's wrong with you. Your coach tells you, your parents tell you, the teachers tell you when they grade you. I think that's very good in the early stages, because it helps you then develop skills. But at some point in your career, generally I think when you are in your teens, you look in a mirror and you have to say, despite all the bumps and warts, "I like that person I'm looking at, and let's just do our best."

The DEEP SEA has more history in it than all the museums of the world-combined.

Why are we ignoring the oceans? Why does NASA spend in one year what NOAA will spend in 1600 years? Why are we looking up? Why are we afraid of the ocean?

NASA's annual budget for space exploration could fund NOAA's budget for ocean exploration for 1600 years.

Fifty percent of our country that we own, have all legal jurisdiction, have all rights to do whatever we want, lies beneath the sea and we have better maps of Mars than that 50 percent.

The fact that this chain of life existed [at volcanic vents on the seafloor] in the black cold of the deep sea and was utterly independent of sunlight-previously thought to be the font of all Earth's life-has startling ramifications. If life could flourish there, nurtured by a complex chemical process based on geothermal heat, then life could exist under similar conditions on planets far removed from the nurturing light of our parent star, the Sun.

Everyone is an explorer. How could you possibly live your life looking at a door and not open it?

It's not a huge surprise that there are habitations at the bottom of the Black Sea.