Quotes from David Attenborough

To restore stability to our planet, therefore, we must restore its biodiversity, the very thing we have removed. It is the only way out of this crisis that we ourselves have created. We must rewild the world!

Everything is set for us to win this future. We have a plan. We know what to do. There is a path to sustainability. It is a path that could lead to a better future for all life on Earth. We must let our politicians and business leaders know that we understand this, that this vision for the future is not just something we need , it is something, above all, that we want .

We often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to save ourselves.

Wherever women have the vote, wherever girls stay in school for longer, wherever women are in charge of their own lives and not dictated to by men, wherever they have access to good healthcare and contraption, wherever they are free to take any job and their aspirations for life are raised, the birth rate falls. The reason for this is straightforward - empowerment brings freedom of choice and when life offers more options for women, their choice is often to have fewer children.

With or without us, the wild will return. .... It seems that, however grave our mistakes, nature will be able to overcome them, given the chance. The living world has survived mass extinctions several times before. But we humans cannot assume that we will do the same.

Ninety-six percent of the mass of all the mammals on Earth is made up of our bodies and those of the animals that we raise to eat.

All we require is the will. The next few decades represent a final opportunity to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. Our future on the planet, the only place as far as we know where life of any kind exists, is at stake.

Beef makes up about a quarter of the meat that we eat, and only 2 per cent of our calories, yet we dedicate 60 per cent of our farmland to raising it.

Anybody who thinks there can be limitless growth in a static, limited environment is either mad or an economist.

A species of willow developed that does not grow vertically upwards, like it's European and American relatives. To do so would to risk being flattened by the ferocious Artic wind. Instead it grows horizontally, keeping close to the ground. Even in the most favorable circumstances it seldom exceeds four inches in height. But it may become as long as some if it's southern relatives are tall. When you walk across a carpet of such prostrate tree, you are, in effect walking over a woodland canopy.

It seems that, however grave our mistakes, nature will be able to overcome them, given the chance.

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 we were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if they were to disappear, the land's ecosystems would collapse.

I think we're lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse.

Invention accumulates. If you combine the diesel engine, GPS, and the echo sounder, the opportunities they create are not just added to one another, they are multiplied.

We humans, alone on Earth, are powerful enough to create worlds, and then to destroy them.

Give and take, that is the essence of what balance is all about.

The greater the biodiversity, the more secure will be all life on Earth,

The natural world is fading. The evidence is all around. It has happened during my lifetime. I have seen it with my own eyes. It will lead to our destruction.

When assessing family connections, the anatomy of a larva is obviously as valid a piece of evidence as that of an adult. Indeed, it is usually even more significant, for animals have the remarkable tendency to repeat during their individual development the stages through which their ancestors passed during evolutionary history.

Since I started filming in the 1950s, on average, wild animal populations have more than halved. I look at these images now and I realize that, although as a young man I felt I was out there in the wild experiencing the untouched natural world... it was an illusion. Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying.

Many amphibian eggs are black with the pigment melanin that protects their delicate cells from damage by ultra-violet light. Newt eggs, however, are white and lack pigment so they need protection of leaves.

Caimans sometimes adopt a creche system. Several females will use the same nursery pool. As the young grow, mothers begin to leave until a single female is left guarding as many as a hundred youngsters in a single pool.

Already in 2011 the world was 0.8ºC warmer on average than it was when I was born. That is a speed of change that exceeds any that has happened in the last 10,000 years.