David Attenborough Quotes (63 Quotes)

When I was right in the middle of Borneo, you thought you were in a different world. There was no radio, no ways of communicating.

You know, it is a terrible thing to appear on television, because people think that you actually know what you're talking about.

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 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.

Oh, my capacity for guilt is enormous. I'm all the time thinking I'm not doing the things I should be doing, not doing enough of it, or I said I'd be vice-president of something or other, and what I have I done Nothing.

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.

It's not just that we are dependent on the natural world for our food and for the very air we breathe-which is, of course, the case-and that the very richness of the natural world continues to provide us with all kinds of assistance.

The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?

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.

Being in touch with the natural world is crucial.

I remember sleeping in places that were infested with rats and waking up with one trundling over my face. Actually, I hate rats In my time, I've picked up all sorts of things in hotels-fleas, lice, tapeworm.

If I can bicycle, I bicycle.

I'm a very old BBC hand.

I haven't-touch wood-had a stomach upset for 15 or 20 years.

If you don't pay attention to it... one doesn't want to be too high-flown about this... but it can lead to a great spiritual deprivation.

The nighttime is a very active time.

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.

Crying wolf is a real danger.

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.

I asked the airline staff what I was going to do with all the animals as I didn't have any food for them. They were very unhelpful.

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.

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.

People say we have all got to join Europe for reasons which even the economists themselves aren't clear on-at the same time we're saying, well yes of course Scotland has got to be independent. And why don't we make Wales independent too And the north of England.

Here we are with even the most obvious things like a fishing policy or a transport policy-we know what the consequences are.

How could anyone believe they actually deserved something like this ... I can only think that it is because I have been able to reach so many people through television.

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

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.

There is a shift... whether there will be some 180 turn-I don't think there can possibly be. But I think that we might move away from some of the appalling materialist considerations which have governed politics for a long time.

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

I get Indian ring-necked parakeets in my garden every morning. There's a big colony living wild down the road. There might be some out there now.

It's a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species.

People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.

Very few people in the history of biology could have seen as much of the actual things that I have, and the sad thing is that I do so little with it. I'm so busy gobbling it up that I don't sort of digest it.

Neither have I said we have got to do this because of some pharmaceutical advantage there may or may not be. The moral issue is that we should not impoverish this world.

Children start off reading in books about lions and giraffes and so on, but they also-if they're 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.

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.

The only way Prescott is going to get through something to do with transport policy, is if the public think there are too many damn things on the road, and use the railways.

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.

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

I think there will be radical changes. But I don't actually think that within the next 100 years the natural world will be reduced to rats and cockroaches, nor do I think that the plant world will be reduced to some kind of desert.

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.

Since when has Finland been a rotten place to live in

I suffer much less than many of my colleagues. I am perfectly able to go to Australia and film within three hours of arrival.

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

I am not over fond of animals.

People knew that animals were nocturnal but they didn't really know what they did because they couldn't see it.

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

The reverse side of the coin in having this extraordinary ability to go anywhere, is that no one anywhere is remote any more.

I mean, one is living an amazingly privileged life. It's only been the last 20 or so years that one could have possibly gone to all the places you and I go to.

I do an awful lot of appearances, and to have one person always grinding the same axe would not be a good idea.