David Attenborough quotes - page 6

David Attenborough is a renowned British broadcaster and natural historian, widely acclaimed for his documentaries on the natural world. His captivating storytelling and passion for wildlife have inspired generations to appreciate and protect nature. He continues to be a leading voice for conservation and environmental awareness. Here are 160 of his quotes:

Make a list of all the environmental and social problems that today afflict us and our poor battered planet.

David Attenborough

The impact of these extra millions of people has spread even beyond the space they physically occupy. Their industries have changed the chemical constituency of the atmosphere. The oceans that cover most of the surface of the planet have been polluted and increasingly acidified. We now realise that the disasters that continue increasingly to afflict the natural world have one element that connects them all - the unprecedented increase in the number of human beings on the planet.

David Attenborough

The fact that so few creatures can tolerate these conditions means that any animal that can, has the place to itself and so can proliferate in vast numbers.

David Attenborough

Penguins underwater look somewhat like dolphins, and indeed the two families have similar evolutionary histories.

David Attenborough

Once, not so long ago, wild pig were common all over Europe, and they're great diggers and rootlers. So maybe the robin's boldness and friendliness with other kinds of animals started in prehistory, even before human beings arrived in Europe.

David Attenborough

For a hummingbird, winter comes 365 times a year.

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

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.

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

I'm not in politics.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

If you watch animals objectively for any length of time, you're driven to the conclusion that their main aim in life is to pass on their genes to the next generation.

David Attenborough

I'm swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune.

David Attenborough

We are a plague on the Earth.

David Attenborough

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.

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