Dam Quotes (8 quotes)
Q: What did the fish say when he hit a concrete wall?
A: Dam!
Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream.
In short story Work Suspended (1943) collected in Evelyn Waugh: The Complete Short Stories (1998), 320.
Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.
[Muir was aghast that the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite was to be flooded by the O'Shaughnessy Dam to provide water for San Francisco. Muir lost this land conservation battle; the dam was completed in 1914.]
[Muir was aghast that the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite was to be flooded by the O'Shaughnessy Dam to provide water for San Francisco. Muir lost this land conservation battle; the dam was completed in 1914.]
Closing remark in The Yosemite (1912), 262.
I hardly look upon this as an operational mission. My job has just been to develop something which will break down a dam wall. I look upon this raid as my last great experiment to see if it can be done on the actual thing.
About his “dambuster” bomb project during World War II. As quoted in W. B. Bartlett, Dam Busters: In the Words of the Bomber Crews (2011, 2013), 103. Wallis said this, ahead of the raid, to Wing Cdr G. P. Gibson, leader of the force of Lancasters of Bomber Command.
Now the American eagle is verging on extinction. Even the polar bear on its ice floes has become easy game for flying sportsmen. A peninsula named Udjung Kulon holds the last two or three dozen Javan rhinoceroses. The last known herd of Arabian oryx has been machine-gunned by a sheik. Blue whales have nearly been harpooned out of their oceans. Pollution ruins bays and rivers. Refuse litters beaches. Dam projects threaten Colorado canyons, Hudson valleys, every place of natural beauty that can be a reservoir for power. Obviously the scientific progress so alluring to me is destroying qualities of greater worth.
In 'The Wisdom of Wilderness', Life (22 Dec 1967), 63, No. 25, 8-9. (Note: the Arabian oryx is no longer listed as extinct.)
Pervasive depletion and overuse of water supplies, the high capital cost of new large water projects, rising pumping costs and worsening ecological damage call for a shift in the way water is valued, used and managed.
From a study Postel wrote for Worldwatch Institute, quoted in New York Times (22 Sep 1985), 19.
There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who “love Nature” while deploring the “artificialities” with which “Man has spoiled ‘Nature.’” The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of “Nature”—but beavers and their dams are.
In Time Enough for Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long (1973), 263.
You gentlemen are really carrying out the third of three experiments. We have tried it out on model dams, also a dam one-fifth in the size of the Mohne dam. I cannot guarantee it will come off, but I hope it will.
To flight crews setting off to drop “dambuster” bombs during World War II. As quoted in W. B. Bartlett, Dam Busters: In the Words of the Bomber Crews (2011, 2013), 103.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
