Quotes By 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
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
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
I am an ardent recycler. I would like to think that it works. I don't know whether it does or not.
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 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'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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
You have to steer a course between not appalling people, but at the same time not misleading them.
David Attenborough
People are not going to care about animal conservation unless they think that animals are worthwhile.
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
Nature isn't positive in that way. It doesn't aim itself at you. It's not being unkind to you.
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
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