Water Quotes

“A family of four needs to transport around 200 pounds of water each and every day to meet its most minimal drinking, cooking, and cleaning needs. To manage such an impossible weight, two trips to the well each day by mother and children are not uncommon. Carrying water for basic subsistence devours school time for children and places a dispiriting burden on the enterprising will of parents to struggle out of their material privation. That the water carrying falls traditionally on women adds the insult of gender inequity to the tragedy.”
― Steven Solomon, Water : the epic struggle for wealth, power, and civilization

“Despite its growing scarcity and preciousness to life, ironically, water is also man’s most misgoverned, inefficiently allocated and profligately wasted natural resource.”
― Steven Solomon, Water : the epic struggle for wealth, power, and civilization

“Sargon”
― Steven Solomon, Water : the epic struggle for wealth, power, and civilization

“In the arid region it is water, not land, which measures production,” he”
― Steven Solomon, Water : the epic struggle for wealth, power, and civilization

“But it wasn’t Helen’s face alone that launched the Greeks’ celebrated thousand ships. It was the lure of booty.”
― Steven Solomon, Water : the epic struggle for wealth, power, and civilization

“Forward-looking Western foreign policy makers also have to be cognizant of the enormous leverage China’s control of Tibet gives it over the mountain sources of the great rivers, and therefore the economic and political fate, of Southeast Asia.”
― Steven Solomon, Water : the epic struggle for wealth, power, and civilization

“It seems unrealistic that Egypt can long maintain its historical hegemony over the waters of the Nile at the expense of widespread poverty, malnutrition, humanitarian crises, and oppressive, dysfunctional government among a fast-growing population of several hundred million Africans upriver.”
― Steven Solomon, Water : the epic struggle for wealth, power, and civilization

“In all, by the end of the twentieth century mankind had built some 45,000 large dams; during the global peak of dam building in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, some 13 were being erected on average every day. World reservoir capacity quadrupled between 1960 and 2000, so that some three to six times more water than existed in all rivers was stored behind giant dams. World hydropower output doubled, food production multiplied two and half times, and overall economic production grew sixfold.”
― Steven Solomon, Water : the epic struggle for wealth, power, and civilization