My favourite quotes.

    Water, the Hub of Life.
    Water is its mater and matrix, mother and medium.
    Water is the most extraordinary substance!
    Practically all its properties are anomolous, which enabled life to use it as building
    material for its machinery.
    Life is water dancing to the tune of solids.
        -  Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1972)

    Water is the driver of Nature.
        - Leonardo da Vinci
        
    We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.
        - Jacques Cousteau

    The crisis of our diminishing water resources is just as severe (if less obviously
    immediate) as any wartime crisis we have ever faced.
    Our survival is just as much at stake as it was at the time of Pearl Harbor, or the Argonne,
    or Gettysburg, or Saratoga.
        -Jim Wright, U.S. Representative, The Coming Water Famine, 1966
        
    High quality water is more than the dream of the conservationists, more than a political
    slogan; high quality water, in the right quantity at the right place at the right time,
    is essential to health, recreation, and economic growth. Of all our planet's
    activities--geological movements, the reproduction and decay of biota, and even the
    disruptive propensities of certain species (elephants and humans come to mind) -- no force
    is greater than the hydrologic cycle.
        - Richard Bangs and Christian Kallen, Rivergods, 1985
    
    Between earth and earth's atmosphere, the amount of water remains constant; there is never
    a drop more, never a drop less.
    This is a story of circular infinity, of a planet birthing itself.
        - Linda Hogan, "Northern Lights," Autumn 1990 

    If you could tomorrow morning make water clean in the world, you would have done, in one
    fell swoop, the best thing you could have done for improving human health by improving
    environmental quality.
        - William C. Clark, speech, Racine, Wisconsin, April 1988
        
    In every glass of water we drink, some of the water has already passed through fishes,
    trees, bacteria, worms in the soil, and many other organisms, including people. . .
    Living systems cleanse water and make it fit, among other things, for human consumption.
        - Elliot A. Norse, in R.J. Hoage, ed., Animal Extinctions, 1985 

    Water is the most critical resource issue of our lifetime and our children's lifetime.
    The health of our waters is the principal measure of how we live on the land."
        -  Luna Leopold

    A river is the report card for its watershed.
        -  Alan Levere

    To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together."
        -  Barry Lopez 

    When we save a river, we save a major part of an ecosystem, and we save ourselves as well
    because of our dependence--physical, economic, spiritual,--on the water and its community
    of life.
        -  Tim Palmer, - The Wild and Scenic Rivers of America 

    Water is also one of the four elements, the most beautiful of God's creations. It is both
    wet and cold, heavy, and with a tendency to descend, and flows with great readiness.
    It is this the Holy Scripture has in view when it says, "And the darkness was upon the
    face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
    Water, then, is the most beautiful element and rich in usefulness, and purifies from all
    filth, and not only from the filth of the body but from that of the soul, if it should
    have received the grace of the Spirit.
        -  John of Damascus (679?-749) Exposition of the Orthodox Faith