David Attenborough People Quotations

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.

People are not going to care about animal conservation unless they think that animals are worthwhile.

You have to steer a course between not appalling people, but at the same time not misleading them.

People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.

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.

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

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.

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.

You know, it is a terrible thing to appear on television, because people think that you actually know what you're talking about.

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

People talk about doom-laden scenarios happening in the future: they are happening in Africa now. You can see it perfectly clearly. Periodic famines are due to too many people living on land that can't sustain them.

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.

Very few people in the history of biology could have seen as much of the actual things that I have, and the sad thing is that I do so little with it. I'm so busy gobbling it up that I don't sort of digest it.

People knew that animals were nocturnal but they didn't really know what they did because they couldn't see it.

You've got to be fairly solemn [about the environment]. I mean the mere notion that there are three times as many people on Earth as there were when I started making television. How can the Earth accommodate them? When people, including politicians, set their faces against looking at the consequences-it's just unbelievable that anyone could ignore it.

That people will object very much to seeing a predator killing its prey, and yet, in the news, will accept showing shots of people shooting one another.

The notion of ever more old people needing ever more young people, who in turn will grow old and need ever more young people and so on, ad infinitum, is an obvious ecological Ponzi scheme.

At a time when it's possible for thirty people to stand on the top of Everest in one day, Antarctica still remains a remote, lonely and desolate continent. A place where it's possible to see the splendours and immensities of the natural world at its most dramatic and, what's more, witness them almost exactly as they were, long, long before human beings ever arrived on the surface of this planet. Long may it remain so.

I would love to see a giant squid. Very few people have seen them. And only about half a dozen people have seen one alive.

Terrorism is an immediate problem that people are very concerned about, and I am as concerned about that as anyone else. But it isn't an either or situation.

I've never actually met one in the wild, but I have seen a king cobra. They go towards people, they rear up six feet tall and they're very aggressive and they are very fast. And one bite means certain death. So if I encountered a king cobra in the wild I would be very alarmed.

You'll find people where their conditions aren't changing in any way, its rather rare for them to be happy.

Opponents say natural selection is not a theory supported by observation or experiment; that it is not based on fact; and that it cannot be proved. Well, no, you cannot prove the theory to people who won't believe in it any more than you can prove that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. However, we know the battle happened then, just as we know the course of evolution on earth unambiguously shows that Darwin was right.

The human population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old uncontrollable way. If we do not take charge of our population size, then nature will do it for us and it is the poor people of the world who will suffer most

People say we have all got to join Europe for reasons which even the economists themselves aren't clear on-at the same time we're saying, well yes of course Scotland has got to be independent. And why don't we make Wales independent too? And the north of England.

How could anyone believe they actually deserved something like this? ... I can only think that it is because I have been able to reach so many people through television.