David Attenborough Quotes

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.

- David Attenborough

London has fine museums, the British Library is one of the greatest library institutions in the world... It's got everything you want, really.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

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

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

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?

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

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

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

I had a huge advantage when I started 50 years ago - my job was secure. I didn't have to promote myself. These days there's far more pressure to make a mark, so the temptation is to make adventure television or personality shows. I hope the more didactic approach won't be lost.

- David Attenborough

I've been bitten by a python. Not a very big one. I was being silly, saying: 'Oh, it's not poisonous...' Then, wallop! But you have fear around animals.

- David Attenborough

We really need to kick the carbon habit and stop making our energy from burning things. Climate change is also really important. You can wreck one rainforest then move, drain one area of resources and move onto another, but climate change is global.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

Crying wolf is a real danger.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

You know, it is a terrible thing to appear on television, because people think that you actually know what you're talking about.

- David Attenborough

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

- David Attenborough

I'm not a propagandist, I'm not a polemicist; my primary interest is just looking at and trying to understand how animals work.

- David Attenborough

To suggest that God specifically created a worm to torture small African children is blasphemy as far as I can see. The Archbishop of Canterbury doesn't believe that.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

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

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

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

- David Attenborough

Being in touch with the natural world is crucial.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

I'm luckier than my grandfather, who didn't move more than five miles from the village in which he was born.

- David Attenborough

I'm against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage.

- David Attenborough

The climate, the economic situation, rising birth rates; none of these things give me a lot of hope or reason to be optimistic.

- David Attenborough

If you watch animals objectively for any length of time, you're driven to the conclusion that their main aim in life is to pass on their genes to the next generation.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature.

- David Attenborough

I'm absolutely strict about it. When I land, I put my watch right, and I don't care what I feel like, I will go to bed at half past eleven. If that means going to bed early or late, that's what I live by. As soon as you get there, live by that time.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

Apart from anything else, I am designed by evolution, like we all are: if we see a little thing like that, big eyes, tiny nose, we go 'aaah'. That's what evolution does. We are programmed to do that. So to find babies the most amazing, isn't surprising, I don't think.

- David Attenborough

You have to steer a course between not appalling people, but at the same time not misleading them.

- David Attenborough

Cameramen are among the most extraordinarily able and competent people I know. They have to have an insight into natural history that gives them a sixth sense of what the creature is going to do, so they can be ready to follow.

- David Attenborough

I don't like rats, but there's not much else I don't like. The problem with rats is they have no fear of human beings, they're loaded with foul diseases, they would run the place given half the chance, and I've had them leap out of a lavatory while I've been sitting on it.

- David Attenborough

I would be absolutely astounded if population growth and industrialisation and all the stuff we are pumping into the atmosphere hadn't changed the climatic balance. Of course it has. There is no valid argument for denial.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

The most extraordinary thing about trying to piece together the missing links in the evolutionary story is that when you do find a missing link and put it in the story, you suddenly need all these other missing links to connect to the new discovery. The gaps and questions actually increase - it's extraordinary.

- David Attenborough

I don't approve of sunbathing, and it's bad for you.

- David Attenborough

Very few species have survived unchanged. There's one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it's survived by being unobtrusive and doing nothing, and you can't accuse human beings of that.

- David Attenborough

I'm swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune.

- David Attenborough

The more you go on, the less you need people standing between you and the animal and the camera waving their arms about.

- David Attenborough

Before the BBC, I joined the Navy in order to travel.

- David Attenborough

I like animals. I like natural history. The travel bit is not the important bit. The travel bit is what you have to do in order to go and look at animals.

- David Attenborough

I've been to Nepal, but I'd like to go to Tibet. It must be a wonderful place to go. I don't think there's anything there, but it would be a nice place to visit.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

Many individuals are doing what they can. But real success can only come if there is a change in our societies and in our economics and in our politics.

- David Attenborough

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

- David Attenborough

Nature isn't positive in that way. It doesn't aim itself at you. It's not being unkind to you.

- David Attenborough

I'd like to see the giant squid. Nobody has ever seen one. I could tell you people who have spent thousands and thousands of pounds trying to see giant squid. I mean, we know they exist because we have seen dead ones. But I have never seen a living one. Nor has anybody else.

- David Attenborough

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

- David Attenborough

All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.

- David Attenborough

I believe the Abominable Snowman may be real. I think there may be something in that.

- David Attenborough

The climate suits me, and London has the greatest serious music that you can hear any day of the week in the world - you think it's going to be Vienna or Paris or somewhere, but if you go to Vienna or Paris and say, 'Let's hear some good music', there isn't any.

- David Attenborough

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

- David Attenborough

All we can hope for is that the thing is going to slowly and imperceptibly shift. All I can say is that 50 years ago there were no such thing as environmental policies.

- David Attenborough

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

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

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

- David Attenborough

I mean, it is an extraordinary thing that a large proportion of your country and my country, of the citizens, never see a wild creature from dawn 'til dusk, unless it's a pigeon, which isn't really wild, which might come and settle near them.

- David Attenborough

I don't think we are going to become extinct. We're very clever and extremely resourceful - and we will find ways of preserving ourselves, of that I'm sure. But whether our lives will be as rich as they are now is another question.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

It's extraordinary how self-obsessed human beings are. The things that people always go on about is, 'tell us about us', 'tell us about the first human being'. We are so self-obsessed with our own history. There is so much more out there than what connects to us.

- David Attenborough

There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it.

- David Attenborough

Natural history is not about producing fables.

- David Attenborough

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

- David Attenborough

We are a plague on the Earth.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

If I can make programmes when I'm 95, that would be fine. But I would think I'll have had enough by then.

- David Attenborough

I'm not an animal lover if that means you think things are nice if you can pat them, but I am intoxicated by animals.

- David Attenborough

We are not overpopulated in an absolute sense; we've got the technology for 10 billion, probably 15 billion people, to live on this planet and live good lives. What we haven't done is developed our technology.

- David Attenborough

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.

- David Attenborough

I suffer much less than many of my colleagues. I am perfectly able to go to Australia and film within three hours of arrival.

- David Attenborough

The fundamental issue is the moral issue.

- David Attenborough

I am an ardent recycler. I would like to think that it works. I don't know whether it does or not.

- David Attenborough

If I can bicycle, I bicycle.

- David Attenborough

I think we're lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse.

- David Attenborough