Quotes from David Attenborough

Cameramen are among the most extraordinarily able and competent people I know. They have to have an insight into natural history that gives them a sixth sense of what the creature is going to do, so they can be ready to follow.

Before the BBC, I joined the Navy in order to travel.

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

The fundamental issue is the moral issue.

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

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.

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

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.

It was regarded as a responsibility of the BBC to provide programs which have a broad spectrum of interest, and if there was a hole in that spectrum, then the BBC would fill it.

What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it.

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.

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.

There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive.

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 would be absolutely astounded if population growth and industrialisation and all the stuff we are pumping into the atmosphere hadn't changed the climatic balance. Of course it has. There is no valid argument for denial.

I'm not a propagandist, I'm not a polemicist; my primary interest is just looking at and trying to understand how animals work.

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.

I'm absolutely strict about it. When I land, I put my watch right, and I don't care what I feel like, I will go to bed at half past eleven. If that means going to bed early or late, that's what I live by. As soon as you get there, live by that time.

I don't approve of sunbathing, and it's bad for you.

I am an ardent recycler. I would like to think that it works. I don't know whether it does or not.

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.

I'm luckier than my grandfather, who didn't move more than five miles from the village in which he was born.

One in eight plant species face extinction.

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.