Top 169 Quotes & Sayings by David Attenborough
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British journalist David Attenborough.
Last updated on November 3, 2024.
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.
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.
If I can bicycle, I bicycle.
I think a major element of jetlag is psychological. Nobody ever tells me what time it is at home.
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.
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'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.
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.
People are not going to care about animal conservation unless they think that animals are worthwhile.
I believe the Abominable Snowman may be real. I think there may be something in that.
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 question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?
You know, it is a terrible thing to appear on television, because people think that you actually know what you're talking about.
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.
I think we're lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Before the BBC, I joined the Navy in order to travel.
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.
An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment.
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.
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.
Natural history is not about producing fables.
We are a plague on the Earth.
I'm against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage.
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.
All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.
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.
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.
There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive.
If I can make programmes when I'm 95, that would be fine. But I would think I'll have had enough by then.
London has fine museums, the British Library is one of the greatest library institutions in the world... It's got everything you want, really.
It's a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I suffer much less than many of my colleagues. I am perfectly able to go to Australia and film within three hours of arrival.
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.
I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.
People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.
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.
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.
I'm swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune.
Crying wolf is a real danger.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Being in touch with the natural world is crucial.
There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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