David Attenborough quotes
Born
May 8, 1926.
Occupation
Broadcaster, naturalist.
Sir David Frederick Attenborough is an English broadcaster and naturalist. He is best known for writing and presenting the nine Life series, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit.
I don’t approve of sunbathing, and it’s bad for you.
– David Attenborough
I believe the Abominable Snowman may be real. I think there may be something in that.
– 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
It’s a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species.
– David Attenborough
If I can bicycle, I bicycle.
– David Attenborough
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
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
I’m against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage.
– David Attenborough
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
I think we’re lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse.
– David Attenborough
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
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
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
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
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
Well, I’m having a good time. Which makes me feel guilty too. How very English.
– 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
Natural history is not about producing fables.
– David Attenborough
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
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
The fundamental issue is the moral issue.
– David Attenborough
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.
– David Attenborough
I’m luckier than my grandfather, who didn’t move more than five miles from the village in which he was born.
– David Attenborough
People are not going to care about animal conservation unless they think that animals are worthwhile.
– David Attenborough
Crying wolf is a real danger.
– David Attenborough
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
There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it.
– 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
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
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 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
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
You can only get really unpopular decisions through if the electorate is convinced of the value of the environment. That’s what natural history programmes should be for.
– 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
Before the BBC, I joined the Navy in order to travel.
– David Attenborough
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.
– 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
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
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
We are a plague on the Earth.
– David Attenborough
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
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
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.
– David Attenborough
I’m swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune.
– 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
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
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
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
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
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