Hawaii Quotes

“Then his attention was caught by the bird of paradise.
"So that's what that looks like?" he asked. "Like one of the paper cranes we had to burn after Pearl Harbor." He took a step closer. "That fiery orange blossom - damned if it doesn't look like a phoenix rising from the ashes."
Ruth understood, at last, what the crane flower had represented to her mother. It wasn't Hawai'i, as much as she had loved Hawai'i. It wasn't good fortune; and it wasn't longevity. No, not even that.
It was rebirth.”
― Alan Brennert, Daughter of Moloka'i

“Hurricane Dora will be remembered as one of the most devastating hurricanes to ever hit Hawaii, even though it was 500 miles away!”
― Steven Magee

“Will Lahaina rebuild or acknowledge that it may be better to build elsewhere in a climate changed Hawaii?”
― Steven Magee

“Hawaiian Electric has turned into the new Pacific Gas and Electric Company.”
― Steven Magee

“Life for electrical utilities in Hawaii forever changed in the August 2023 Maui wildfires.”
― Steven Magee

“Why is a private utility company that is linked to destroying Lahaina being given $95,000,000 in taxpayer money?”
― Steven Magee

“How much has the government spent on the Ukraine war and how much has it spent on the Lahaina disaster in Hawaii?”
― Steven Magee

“I expect Hawaii summer vacations will end soon, as tourists will not like the excessive heat that climate change is creating in the Hawaiian islands.”
― Steven Magee

“After the destruction of Lahaina, I will not be voting Democrat in the next election.”
― Steven Magee

“I expect the Maui wildfires that destroyed Lahaina to be remembered as one of the biggest tourism disasters in history.”
― Steven Magee

“Living in Hawaii and working at the world’s largest telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory was my September 11th 2001.”
― Steven Magee

“I remember being at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii and watching the 9-11 attacks on TV. It happened in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep and I only found out about it when I arrived at work. By that time the two towers had collapsed hours earlier.”
― Steven Magee

“The first few days of pollution from a Hawaii volcanic eruption can be bad while it fountains lava. Once it settles in to oozing lava, the pollution generally calms down.”
― Steven Magee

“It was interesting to watch the Lahaina disaster victims getting an education on how their government really is!”
― Steven Magee

“In the second month of the Lahaina disaster, it was clear shady things were going on within the Maui government.”
― Steven Magee

“In August 2023, Maui became the Hawaii poverty island.”
― Steven Magee

“After the Maui wildfire disaster only 3,000 rental cars were in use, the other 18,000 were parked in fields as the tourism crashed.”
― Steven Magee

“The Maui wildfires disaster led to the Maui economic disaster.”
― Steven Magee

“In November and December 2023, the popular Maui Kaanapali beach was filled with local wildfire victims that were ‘fishing for housing’.”
― Steven Magee

“The Maui wildfire disaster turned into a sad story about government incompetence.”
― Steven Magee

“In Hawaii, you are corporate ‘ohana’ until it becomes ‘inconvenient’.”
― Steven Magee

“There was a management culture of harassing workers out of their jobs through ‘voluntary’ resignations at the biologically toxic Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii.”
― Steven Magee

“When I worked at the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii, it was a mismanaged group of telescopes with many OSHA workplace violations.”
― Steven Magee

“The management teams of the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii were withholding key health and safety information from workers and there was a secret culture of taking lone workers into surprise meetings where the management team would harass them for their ‘voluntary’ resignations.”
― Steven Magee

“By the time I left the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii, I was aware the management teams were engaging in illegal activities.”
― Steven Magee

“When I visited Hawaii island in 2024, both the library and bus stop I use had security guards on them that were not there in the past.”
― Steven Magee

“Mom refused to let Gran drive the convertible up the volcano in the middle of the night.”
― Becky Dean, Picture-Perfect Boyfriend

“The Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea is arguably one of the most disliked projects in the history of scientific discovery.”
― Steven Magee

“In Hilo, we are the `āina. Its mist is our breath, its rain our tears, its
waters our blood.
Our veins run deep, our song louder than their noise. Roots too deep to
extract. That’s the thing about hula. Burn your books, rewrite your history,
build walls, plant flags. Hula is written within the swirls of our feet. It’s our
umbilical cord, our pulse. Our battle cry, our death rattle, our moment of
conception. The chants are archived in the stars. Hula is the heat rising from
within our volcanoes. It is the pull of the tides, the beat of the surf against
our cliffs. It is our hair, our teeth, our bones. Our DNA.
You can steal a kingdom, but the kingdom will never belong to you”
― Jasmin Iolani Hakes, Hula

“Decades of desecrating Hawaii’s most sacred spaces with industrial astronomical observatories atop spiritual Hawaiian mountains appears to be in the process of ending.”
― Steven Magee