David Attenborough Quotes

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

Birds are the most accomplished aeronauts the world has ever seen. They fly high and low, at great speed, and very slowly. And always with extraordinary precision and control.

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

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

Humanity is facing a very big, slow, long, drawn-out threat, and that is to do with the way the weather is changing and the size of the population.

I suspect that happiness is not a state but rather a transition.

The fundamental issue is the moral issue.

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

Trade is a proper and decent relationship, with dignity and respect on both sides.

Can a growing human population still leave space for wildlife?

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.

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

Fundamentally not to waste energy. If we were all to reduce our demands for energy, it would make an enormous amount of difference.

The notion of ever more old people needing ever more young people, who will in turn grow old and need even more young people, and so on ad infinitum, is an obvious ecological Ponzi scheme.

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.

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.

Natural history is not about producing fables.

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

The nature of human beings is that they'd far rather face the disaster that is happening tonight than the one that is happening tomorrow.

We can now manipulate images to such an extrodinary extent that there's no lie you cannot tell.

It never really occurred to me to believe in God.

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

That people will object very much to seeing a predator killing its prey, and yet, in the news, will accept showing shots of people shooting one another.

All the modern devices we have enable us to investigate things and have enabled us to do better.

Crying wolf is a real danger.

One in eight plant species face extinction.

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

When I was a boy in the 1930s, the carbon dioxide level was still below 300 parts per million. This year, it reached 382, the highest figure for hundreds of thousands of years.

It is curiosity, quite right-a divine curiosity. A characteristic of the gods is curiosity.

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.

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.

No, not a feminist. I'm a humanist. I'm neither one side nor the other.

Now, I find that very difficult to reconcile with notions about a merciful God.

You'll find people where their conditions aren't changing in any way, its rather rare for them to be happy.

I think the most alarming animals I have encountered are really poisonous snakes.

Since when has Finland been a rotten place to live in?

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

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

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

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.

If we were all to reduce our demands for energy, it would make an enormous amount of difference.

Do we really require so many gardening programmes, makeover programmes or celebrity chefs?

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.

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.

There are perfectly good independent small nations.

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

The reverse side of the coin in having this extraordinary ability to go anywhere, is that no one anywhere is remote any more.

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

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