Top 90 David Attenborough Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “You can cry about death and very properly so, your own as well as anybody else’s. But it’s inevitable, so you’d better grapple with it and cope and be aware that not only is it inevitable, but it has always been inevitable, if you see what I mean.”

— David Attenborough

52. “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.”

— David Attenborough

53. “It never really occurred to me to believe in God.”

— David Attenborough

54. “We often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to save ourselves. With or without us, the wild will return.”

— David Attenborough

55. “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.”

— David Attenborough

56. “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.”

— David Attenborough

57. “If you watch animals objectively for any length of time, you’re driven to the conclusion that their main aim in life is to pass on their genes to the next generation.”

— David Attenborough

58. “I think we’re lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse.”

— David Attenborough

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

— David Attenborough

60. “It is vital that there is a narrator figure whom people believe. That’s why I never do commercials. If I started saying that margarine was the same as motherhood, people would think I was a liar.”

— David Attenborough

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

— David Attenborough

62. “We have come as far as we have because we are the cleverest creatures to have ever lived on Earth. But if we are to continue to exist, we will require more than intelligence. We will require wisdom.”

— David Attenborough

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

— David Attenborough

64. “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.”

— David Attenborough

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

— David Attenborough

66. “We moved from being a part of nature to being apart from nature.”

— David Attenborough

67. “Trade is a proper and decent relationship, with dignity and respect on both sides.”

— David Attenborough

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

— David Attenborough

69. “When I was a boy in the 1930s, the carbon dioxide level was still below 300 parts per million. This year, it reached 382, the highest figure for hundreds of thousands of years.”

— David Attenborough

70. “I don’t like rats, but there’s not much else I don’t like. The problem with rats is they have no fear of human beings, they’re loaded with foul diseases, they would run the place given half the chance, and I’ve had them leap out of a lavatory while I’ve been sitting on it.”

— David Attenborough

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

— David Attenborough

72. “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.”

— David Attenborough

73. “I’m against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage.”

— David Attenborough

74. “I mean, it is an extraordinary thing that a large proportion of your country and my country, of the citizens, never see a wild creature from dawn ’til dusk, unless it’s a pigeon, which isn’t really wild, which might come and settle near them.”

— David Attenborough

75. “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.”

— David Attenborough

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

— David Attenborough

77. “Warm-bloodedness is one of the key factors that have enabled mammals to conquer the Earth, and to develop the most complex bodies in the animal kingdom. In this series, we will travel the world to discover just how varied and how astonishing mammals are.”

— David Attenborough

78. “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.”

— David Attenborough

79. “I remember when we were in the World Cup in Australia and I had to win the singles against Tony Payne, best of seven legs, to win it. I was 2-0 down but ended up beating him I suffer much less than many of my colleagues. I am perfectly able to go to Australia and film within three hours of arrival.”

— David Attenborough

80. “The reverse side of the coin in having this extraordinary ability to go anywhere, is that no one anywhere is remote any more.”

— David Attenborough

81. “Nature isn’t positive in that way. It doesn’t aim itself at you. It’s not being unkind to you.”

— David Attenborough

82. “There are perfectly good independent small nations.”

— David Attenborough

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

— David Attenborough

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

— David Attenborough

85. “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.”

— David Attenborough

86. “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.”

— David Attenborough

87. “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.”

— David Attenborough

88. “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.”

— David Attenborough

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

— David Attenborough

90. “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.”

— David Attenborough

91. “Since when has Finland been a rotten place to live in?”

— David Attenborough

92. “I’m swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune.”

— David Attenborough

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

— David Attenborough

94. “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.”

— David Attenborough

95. “It took a million years of unprecedented volcanic activity during the Permian to poison the ocean. We have begun to do so again in less than two hundred. By burning fossil fuels, we are releasing carbon dioxide captured by prehistoric plants over millions of years in a few decades.”

— David Attenborough