Quotes from David Attenborough

By 2011, the extent of the summer sea ice in the Arctic had shrunk by 30 percent in 30 years.

We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.' We had all simultaneously realised that our home was not limitless – there was an edge to our existence.

The carcasses were covered by a blanket of handsome orange-yellow butterflies, flexing their wings as they fed on the meat. I reflected sadly that natural history often deals harshly with our romantic illusions about wild life. The most brilliantly beautiful butterflies of the tropical rain forest do not fly in search of appropriately gorgeous blossoms, but instead seek a meal from carrion or dung.

We can't cut down rainforests forever. And anything that we can't do forever is by definition, unsustainable. If we do things that are unsustainable, the damage accumulates, ultimately, to a point where the whole system collapses. No ecosystem, not matter how big, is secure. Even one as vast as the ocean.

For life to truly thrive on this planet, there must be immense biodiversity. Only when billions of different individual organisms make the most of every resource and opportunity they encounter, and millions of species lead lives that interlock so that they sustain each other, can the planet run efficiently. The greater the biodiversity, the more secure will be all life on Earth, including ourselves. Yet the way we humans are now living on Earth is sending biodiversity into a decline.

No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experiened".

Ingen ville att djur skulle utrotas. Människor började bry sig om naturen när de blev mer medvetna om den. Och televisionen bidrog till det, världen över.

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.

The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?

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

An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment...

Nature isn't positive in that way. It doesn't aim itself at you. It's not being unkind to you.

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.

It never really occurred to me to believe in God.

Now, I find that very difficult to reconcile with notions about a merciful God.

The idea that the Lord had given us a present, that the world is a gift from God... well, the amount of stuff, back then, that the Lord was giving away was limited. We do not have dominion.

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.

There are perfectly good independent small nations.

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.

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.

Natural history is not about producing fables.

The climate, the economic situation, rising birth rates; none of these things give me a lot of hope or reason to be optimistic.

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.

Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a co-ordinated view about the planet, it's going to get worse and worse.