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.”

“All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.”

“Well, I'm having a good time. Which makes me feel guilty too. How very English.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The more you go on, the less you need people standing between you and the animal and the camera waving their arms about.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“London has fine museums, the British Library is one of the greatest library institutions in the world... It's got everything you want, really.”

“If I can bicycle, I bicycle.”

“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.”

“Now, over half of us live in an urban environment. My home, too, is here in the city of London. Looking down on this great metropolis, the ingenuity with which we continue to reshape the surface of our planet is very striking. It’s also very sobering, and reminds me of just how easy it is for us to lose our connection with the natural world.Yet it’s on this connection that the future of both humanity and the natural world will depend. And surely, it is our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth.”

“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.”

“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.”