QUOTES by David Attenborough
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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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Attenborough
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.
Quote by -David Attenborough
I am an ardent recycler. I would like to think that it works. I don't know whether it does or not.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Attenborough
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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Attenborough
I believe the Abominable Snowman may be real. I think there may be something in that.
Quote by -David Attenborough
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.
Quote by -David Attenborough
I think a major element of jetlag is psychological. Nobody ever tells me what time it is at home.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Attenborough
I would be absolutely astounded if population growth and industrialisation and all the stuff we are pumping into the atmosphere hadn't changed the climatic balance. Of course it has. There is no valid argument for denial.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Attenborough
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.
Quote by -David Attenborough
I think we're lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Attenborough
The climate suits me, and London has the greatest serious music that you can hear any day of the week in the world - you think it's going to be Vienna or Paris or somewhere, but if you go to Vienna or Paris and say, 'Let's hear some good music', there isn't any.
Quote 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.
Quote by -David Attenborough
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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Attenborough
I had a huge advantage when I started 50 years ago - my job was secure. I didn't have to promote myself. These days there's far more pressure to make a mark, so the temptation is to make adventure television or personality shows. I hope the more didactic approach won't be lost.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Attenborough
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.
Quote by -David Attenborough