Top 100 David Attenborough Quotes
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Its about cherishing the woodland at the bottom of your garden or the stream that runs through it. It affects every aspect of life.
David Attenborough
#5. 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
#6. Life is not all high emotion. Some of the most interesting things are when its not highly emotional: little details of relationships and body language.
David Attenborough
#7. I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.
David Attenborough
#8. 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
#9. What humans do over the next 50 years will determine the fate of all life on the planet.
David Attenborough
#11. Trade is a proper and decent relationship, with dignity and respect on both sides.
David Attenborough
#12. 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
#14. There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it.
David Attenborough
#16. 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
#17. I believe the Abominable Snowman may be real. I think there may be something in that.
David Attenborough
#18. 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
#19. I'm against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage.
David Attenborough
#20. You have to steer a course between not appalling people, but at the same time not misleading them.
David Attenborough
#21. The notion of ever more old people needing ever more young people, who in turn will grow old and need ever more young people and so on, ad infinitum, is an obvious ecological Ponzi scheme.
David Attenborough
#22. The correct scientific response to something that is not understood must always be to look harder for the explanation, not give up and assume a supernatural cause.
David Attenborough
#23. I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.
David Attenborough
#24. The World is full of wonders, but they become more Wonderful, not less Wonderful when Science looks at them.
David Attenborough
#25. It is that range of biodiversity that we must care for - the whole thing - rather than just one or two stars.
David Attenborough
#26. It is curiosity, quite right-a divine curiosity. A characteristic of the gods is curiosity.
David Attenborough
#27. The idea that the Lord had given us a present, that the world is a gift from God ... well, the amount of stuff, back then, that the Lord was giving away was limited. We do not have dominion.
David Attenborough
#29. Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps we should control the population to ensure the survival of our environment
David Attenborough
#30. It's a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species.
David Attenborough
#31. 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
#33. 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
#34. All life is related. And it enables us to construct with confidence the complex tree that represents the history of life
David Attenborough
#35. Bringing nature into the classroom can kindle a fascination and passion for the diversity of life on earth and can motivate a sense of responsibility to safeguard it.
David Attenborough
#36. Reptiles and amphibians are sometimes thought of as primitive, dull and dimwitted. In fact, of course, they can be lethally fast, spectacularly beautiful, surprisingly affectionate and very sophisticated.
David Attenborough
#37. 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.
David Attenborough
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is either a madman or an economist.
David Attenborough
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#46. 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
#47. I'm no longer sceptical. I no longer have any doubt at all. I think climate change is the major challenge facing the world.
David Attenborough
#48. People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.
David Attenborough
#49. Well, I'm having a good time. Which makes me feel guilty too. How very English.
David Attenborough
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. The savage, rocky shores of Christmas Island, 200 miles south of Java, in the Indian Ocean. It's November, the moon is in its third quarter, and the sun is just setting. In a few hours from now, on this very shore, a thousand million lives will be launched.
David Attenborough
#59. 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
#60. Clearly we could devastate the world ... as far as we know, the Earth is the only place in the universe where there is life. Its continued survival now rests in our hands
David Attenborough
#62. The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it.
David Attenborough
#63. I think a major element of jetlag is psychological. Nobody ever tells me what time it is at home.
David Attenborough
#64. 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
#66. 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
#67. I have no doubt that the fundamental problem the planet faces is the enormous increase in the human population
David Attenborough
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. Children start off reading in books about lions and giraffes and so on, but they also-if theyre lucky enough and have reasonable privileges of any human being-are able to go into a garden and turn over stone and see a worm and see a slug and see an ant.
David Attenborough
#73. Do we really require so many gardening programmes, makeover programmes or celebrity chefs?
David Attenborough
#74. Warm-bloodedness is one of the key factors that have enabled mammals to conquer the Earth, and to develop the most complex bodies in the animal kingdom. In this series, we will travel the world to discover just how varied and how astonishing mammals are.
David Attenborough
#75. It's like saying that two and two equals four, but if you wish to believe it, it could also be five ... Evolution is not a theory; it is a fact, every bit as much as the historical fact that William the Conqueror landed in 1066.
David Attenborough
#76. 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
#77. I'm luckier than my grandfather, who didn't move more than five miles from the village in which he was born.
David Attenborough
#78. 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
#79. Nature isn't positive in that way. It doesn't aim itself at you. It's not being unkind to you.
David Attenborough
#80. The human population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old uncontrollable way. If we do not take charge of our population size, then nature will do it for us and it is the poor people of the world who will suffer most
David Attenborough
#81. If we and the rest of the back-boned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world's ecosystems would collapse
David Attenborough
#82. All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.
David Attenborough
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. I am an ardent recycler. I would like to think that it works. I don't know whether it does or not.
David Attenborough
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Now, I find that very difficult to reconcile with notions about a merciful God.
David Attenborough
#91. 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
#92. 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
#94. 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
#95. We can now manipulate images to such an extrodinary extent that there's no lie you cannot tell.
David Attenborough
#96. How could I look my grandchildren in the eye and say I knew what was happening to the world and did nothing.
David Attenborough
#97. 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
#98. I'm swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune.
David Attenborough
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