David Attenborough's Quotes

If I were beginning my career today, I don't think I would take the same direction. Television is at a crossroads at the moment. And although I am not up to date technologically, I suspect that somewhere out there people are conveying things about natural history by means other than television, and I think if I were beginning today, I'd be there.

If my grandchildren were to look at me and say, 'You were aware species were disappearing and you did nothing, you said nothing', that I think is culpable. I don't know how much more they expect me to be doing, I'd better ask them.

In the old days... it was a basic, cardinal fact that producers didn't have opinions. When I was producing natural history programmes, I didn't use them as vehicles for my own opinion. They were factual programmes.

It is vital that there is a narrator figure whom people believe. That's why I never do commercials. If I started saying that margarine was the same as motherhood, people would think I was a liar.

It was regarded as a responsibility of the BBC to provide programs which have a broad spectrum of interest, and if there was a hole in that spectrum, then the BBC would fill it.

It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change; it's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.

People talk about doom-laden scenarios happening in the future: they are happening in Africa now. You can see it perfectly clearly. Periodic famines are due to too many people living on land that can't sustain them.

Steve Irwin did wonderful conservation work but I was uncomfortable about some of his stunts. Even if animals aren't aware that you are not treating them with respect, the viewers are.

Television of course actually started in Britain in 1936, and it was a monopoly, and there was only one broadcaster and it operated on a license which is not the same as a government grant.

The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing.

The whole of science, and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man, is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here, and how do you fit in, and what's it all about.

You can cry about death and very properly so, your own as well as anybody else's. But it's inevitable, so you'd better grapple with it and cope and be aware that not only is it inevitable, but it has always been inevitable, if you see what I mean.

You can only get really unpopular decisions through if the electorate is convinced of the value of the environment. That's what natural history programmes should be for.

An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment.

People are not going to care about animal conservation unless they think that animals are worthwhile.

People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.

I can mention many moments that were unforgettable and revelatory. But the most single revelatory three minutes was the first time I put on scuba gear and dived on a coral reef. It's just the unbelievable fact that you can move in three dimensions.

I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.

What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it.

Getting to places like Bangkok or Singapore was a hell of a sweat. But when you got there it was the back of beyond. It was just a series of small tin sheds.

It is that range of biodiversity that we must care for - the whole thing - rather than just one or two stars.

I don't run a car, have never run a car. I could say that this is because I have this extremely tender environmentalist conscience, but the fact is I hate driving.

The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?

There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive.

Dealing with global warming doesn't mean we have all got to suddenly stop breathing. Dealing with global warming means that we have to stop waste, and if you travel for no reason whatsoever, that is a waste.

Being in touch with the natural world is crucial.

Crying wolf is a real danger.

As far as I'm concerned, if there is a supreme being then He chose organic evolution as a way of bringing into existence the natural world... which doesn't seem to me to be necessarily blasphemous at all.

Birds are the most popular group in the animal kingdom. We feed them and tame them and think we know them. And yet they inhabit a world which is really rather mysterious.

It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.

If I can bicycle, I bicycle.

The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there's a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.

We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that's what's happening. Too many people there. They can't support themselves - and it's not an inhuman thing to say. It's the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it's going to get worse and worse.

Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?

I think a major element of jetlag is psychological. Nobody ever tells me what time it is at home.

It's a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species.

The fundamental issue is the moral issue.

Well, I'm having a good time. Which makes me feel guilty too. How very English.