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.Collection: Politics
Natural history is not about producing fables.Collection: History
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.Collection: Space
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.Collection: Chance
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.Collection: Science
Before the BBC, I joined the Navy in order to travel.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Car
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.Collection: Environmental
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.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Death
We really need to kick the carbon habit and stop making our energy from burning things. Climate change is also really important. You can wreck one rainforest then move, drain one area of resources and move onto another, but climate change is global.Collection: Change
There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it.Collection: Change
Dealing with global warming doesn't mean we have all got to suddenly stop breathing. Dealing with global warming means that we have to stop waste, and if you travel for no reason whatsoever, that is a waste.Collection: Travel
People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.Collection: Amazing
I think a major element of jetlag is psychological. Nobody ever tells me what time it is at home.Collection: Travel
All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.Collection: Environmental
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.Collection: History
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?
I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.
It is that range of biodiversity that we must care for - the whole thing - rather than just one or two stars.
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.
The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?
If I can bicycle, I bicycle.
An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment.
Crying wolf is a real danger.
People are not going to care about animal conservation unless they think that animals are worthwhile.
It's a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species.
I'm against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage.
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.
We are a plague on the Earth.
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.
Well, I'm having a good time. Which makes me feel guilty too. How very English.
Nature isn't positive in that way. It doesn't aim itself at you. It's not being unkind to you.
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.
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.
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.
There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive.
The fundamental issue is the moral issue.
I can mention many moments that were unforgettable and revelatory. But the most single revelatory three minutes was the first time I put on scuba gear and dived on a coral reef. It's just the unbelievable fact that you can move in three dimensions.
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.
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.
What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it.
I am an ardent recycler. I would like to think that it works. I don't know whether it does or not.
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.
Being in touch with the natural world is crucial.
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.
I'm swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune.
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.
You have to steer a course between not appalling people, but at the same time not misleading them.