David Attenborough: Quotes about animals

“Fifty years ago, when the WWF was founded there were about three billion people on earth. Now there are almost seven billion. Over twice as many - and every one of them needing space. Space for their homes, space to grow their food (or to get others to grow it for them), space to build schools and roads and airfields. A little of that space might be taken from land occupied by other people but most of it could only come from the land which, for millions of years, animals and plants have to themselves.”

David Attenborough

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

People , School , Food , Home

“Midwinter, and the countryside is so still, it seems almost lifeless. But these trees and bushes and grasses around me are living organisms just like animals. And they have to face very much the same sort of problems as animals face throughout their lives if they're to survive. They have to fight one another, they have to compete for mates, they have to invade new territories. But the reason that we're seldom aware of these dramas is that plants of course live on a different time-scale.”

David Attenborough

Opening words
The Private Life of Plants (1995)

Problem , Tree , Grass , Time

“And they noticed what few others had done – that all over the world, charismatic animals that were once numerous were beginning to disappear. The Arabian oryx, which once had been widespread all over the peninsula had now been reduced to a few hundred. In Spain, there were less than a hundred imperial eagles. The Californian condor was down to about sixty. In Hawaii, a goose that had lived in flocks on the lava fields around the great volcanoes were reduced to fifty. The strange little rhinoceros that lived in the dwindling forests of Java – to about forty. Wherever you looked there were examples of animals whose populations were falling rapidly. This planet was in danger of losing a significant number of its inhabitants – both animals and plants.”

David Attenborough

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

World , Animals

“An eye from another world; a smell-detector, investigating the path ahead. We don't often see a snail that way, and that's because we've only recently had the tiny lenses and electronic cameras that we need to explore this miniature world. But when we meet its inhabitants face to face, we suddenly realise that their behaviour can be just as meaningful to us as the behaviour of many animals more our own size.”

David Attenborough

Opening narration
Life in the Undergrowth (2005)

World , Way , Animals

“The Roman public's thirst for blood and pleasure in witnessing pain seems to have been unquenchable and without limit." "The caged animals were kept in dungeons below the main arena. The terrified animals in their cages were hoisted up from this pit. And not only animals, human beings too, criminals, slaves and prisoners of war. And here in this arena they were set one upon the other to provide the crowd with spectacles of the most appalling carnage. It still continues to this day in Spain.”

David Attenborough

The First Eden (1987)

Pain , War , Pleasure , Animals

“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. Most do so directly, by breeding. In the few examples that don't do so by design, they do it indirectly, by helping a relative with whom they share a great number of their genes. And in as much as the legacy that human beings pass on to the next generation is not only genetic but to a unique degree cultural, we do the same. So animals and ourselves, to continue the line, will endure all kinds of hardship, overcome all kinds of difficulties, and eventually the next generation appears. This albatross is over 30 years old, she's already a grandmother, and this year once again she has produced a chick. She will devote the next 10 months of her life looking after it. She has faced the trials of life and triumphed, for her little 2 day old chick the trials are just beginning.”

David Attenborough

Closing lines
The Trials of Life (1990)

Life , Appearance , Time , Help

“Our planet, the Earth, is, as far as we know, unique in the universe. It contains life. Even in its most barren stretches, there are animals. Around the equator, where those two essentials for life, sunshine and moisture, are most abundant, great forests grow. And here plants and animals proliferate in such numbers that we still have not even named all the different species. Here, animals and plants, insects and birds, mammals and man live together in intimate and complex communities, each dependent on one another. Two thirds of the surface of this unique planet are covered by water, and it was here indeed that life began. From the oceans, it has spread even to the summits of the highest mountains as animals and plants have responded to the changing face of the Earth.”

David Attenborough

Opening narration
The Living Planet (1984)

Life , Mountain , Communication , Bird

“There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive. This is the story of how a few of them came to be as they are.”

David Attenborough

Opening narration
Life on Earth (1979)

World , Problem , Animals

“Make a list of all the environmental and social problems that today afflict us and our poor battered planet. – not just the extinction of species and animals and plants, that fifty years ago was the first signs of impending global disaster, but traffic congestion, oil prices, pressure on the health service, the growth of mega-cities, migration patterns, immigration policies, unemployment, the loss of arable land, desertification, famine, increasingly violent weather, the acidification of the oceans, the collapse of fish stocks, rising sea temperatures, the loss of rain forest. The list goes on and on. But they all share an underlying cause. Every one of these global problems, environmental as well as social becomes more difficult – and ultimately impossible - to solve with ever more people.”

David Attenborough

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

People , Health , Problem , Fish

“I can't pretend that I got involved with filming the natural world fifty years ago because I had some great banner to carry about conservation - not at all, I always had a huge pleasure in just watching the natural world and seeing what happens. - I made those films because it was a hugely enjoyable thing to do. But as I went on making them it became more and more apparent that the creatures that were giving me so much joy were under threat. The fun is in delighting in the animals but if you do that you owe them something so you have an obligation to speak out and to do what you can to protect them. m3s08-m4s05”

David Attenborough

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

Pleasure , World , Nature , Animals

“I was born into a world of just under two billion people today there are nearly seven billion of us. Whenever I hear those numbers I can honestly say I find it incredible, triple the number of human beings in what seems like the blink of an eye and the world transformed utterly. Human population density is a factor in every environmental problem I have ever encountered, from urban sprawl to urban overcrowding; disappearing tropical forests to ugly sinks of plastic waste, and now the relentless increase of atmospheric pollution. I've spent much of the last 50 years seeking wilderness filming animals in their natural habitat and, to some extent, avoiding humans. But, over the years, true wilderness has become harder to find. m1s58-m3s03”

David Attenborough

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

People , World , Nature , Problem

“If we and the rest of the backboned animals 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. The soil would lose its fertility. Many of the plants would no longer be pollinated. Lots of animals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals would have nothing to eat. And our fields and pastures would be covered with dung and carrion. These small creatures are within a few inches of our feet, wherever we go on land – but often, they're disregarded. We would do very well to remember them.”

David Attenborough

Closing lines
Life in the Undergrowth (2005)

World , Bird , Animals

“Ever since we arrived on this planet as a species, we've cut them down, dug them up, burnt them and poisoned them. Today we're doing so on a greater scale than ever [… ] We destroy plants at our peril. Neither we nor any other animal can survive without them. The time has now come for us to cherish our green inheritance, not to pillage it – for without it, we will surely perish.”

David Attenborough

Closing lines
The Private Life of Plants (1995)

Time , Animals

“I'm very aware that this programme may be regarded as bleak or depressing - an increasing population with an ever decreasing supply of resources – but humans have capabilities that animals don't: to think rationally; to study; to plan ahead. The number of people on the planet depends on the personal decisions we each make regarding the number of children we have even setting aside the moral responsibility we have to protect other species, if we continue to damage our ecosystem, we damage ourselves. Its clear that we'll have to change the way that we live and use our resources. We're at a crossroads where we can chose to cooperate or carry on regardless. Can our intelligence save us? I hope so. m46s24-m47s15”

David Attenborough

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

Children , People , Hope , Way

“It used to be said, that in places like this, nature eventually failed to support man, the truth is exactly the reverse, here man failed to support nature. Ten thousand years ago man regarded the natural world as divine, but as he domesticated animals and plants so nature lost some of its mystery and appeared to be little more than a larder that could be raided with impunity.”

David Attenborough

52 min 20 sec
The First Eden (1987)

Truth , World , Support , Nature

“This is the last programme in this natural history, and it's very different from all the others because it's been devoted to just one animal: ourselves. And that may have been a very misleading thing to have done. It may have given the impression that somehow man was the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all those thousands of millions of years of development had no purpose other than to put man on Earth. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for such a belief. No reason to suppose that man's stay on Earth should be any longer than that of the dinosaurs. He may have learned how to control his environment, how to pass on information from one generation to another, but the very forces of evolution that brought him into existence here on these African plains are still at work elsewhere in the world, and if man were to disappear, for whatever reason, there is doubtless somewhere some small, unobtrusive creature that would seize the opportunity and, with a spurt of evolution, take man's place. But although denying a special place in the world may be becomingly modest, the fact remains that man has an unprecedented control over the world and everything in it. And so, whether he likes it or not, what happens next is very largely up to him.”

David Attenborough

Closing lines
Life on Earth (1979)

World , History , Nature , Learning

“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

Episode I
The Life of Mammals (2002)

World , Travel , Animals

“I'm not an animal lover if that means you think things are nice if you can pet them, but I am intoxicated by animals.”

David Attenborough

Interview in Metro 29 Jan 2013

Lovers , Thinking , Animals

“The fact that so few creatures can tolerate these conditions means that any animal that can, has the place to itself and so can proliferate in vast numbers.”

David Attenborough

"The Limits of Endurance"
The Life of Birds (1998)

Animals

“Once, not so long ago, wild pig were common all over Europe, and they're great diggers and rootlers. So maybe the robin's boldness and friendliness with other kinds of animals started in prehistory, even before human beings arrived in Europe.”

David Attenborough

"The Insatiable Appetites"
The Life of Birds (1998)

Animals