Quotes By David Attenborough

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

Crying wolf is a real danger.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

Natural history is not about producing fables.

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

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.

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.

The fundamental issue is the moral issue.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.