David Attenborough > Quotes

“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.”
― David Attenborough

“I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…”
― David Attenborough

“I don't think whole populations are villainous, but Americans are just extraordinarily unaware of all kinds of things. If you live in the middle of that vast continent, with apparently everything your heart could wish for just because you were born there, then why worry? [...] If people lose knowledge, sympathy and understanding of the natural world, they're going to mistreat it and will not ask their politicians to care for it.”
― David Attenborough

“No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experiened”
― David Attenborough

“The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it.”
― Sir David Attenborough

“The fact is that no species has ever had such wholesale control over everything on earth, living or dead, as we now have. That lays upon us, whether we like it or not, an awesome responsibility. In our hands now lies not only our own future, but that of all other living creatures with whom we share the earth.”
― David Attenborough, Life on Earth

“We only know a tiny proportion about the complexity of the natural world. Wherever you look, there are still things we don’t know about and don’t understand. [...] There are always new things to find out if you go looking for them.”
― David Attenborough

“‎Using his burgeoning intelligence, this most successful of all mammals has exploited the environment to produce food for an ever increasing population. Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it's time we controlled the population to allow the survival of the environment.”
― David Attenborough

“We moved from being a part of nature to being apart from nature.”
― David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

“We live our comfortable lives in the shadow of a disaster of our own making. That disaster is being brought about by the very things that allow us to live our comfortable lives.”
― David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

“I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.”
― David Attenborough

“This last chapter .. may have given the impression that somehow man is the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all these millions of years of development have had no purpose other than to put him on earth. There is no scientific evidence whatever to support such a view and no reason to suppose that our stay here will be any more permanent than that of the dinosaur.”
― David Attenborough, Life on Earth

“Young people: They care. They know that this is the world that they're going to grow up in, that they're going to spend the rest of their lives in. But, I think it's more idealistic than that. They actually believe that humanity, human species, has no right to destroy and despoil regardless.”
― David Attenborough

“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, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

“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, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

“We have a finite environment—the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.”
― David Attenborough

“I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.”
― David Attenborough

“We are at a unique stage in our history. Never before have we had such an awareness of what we are doing to the planet, and never before have we had the power to do something about that. Surely we all have a responsibility to care for our Blue Planet. The future of humanity and indeed, all life on earth, now depends on us.”
― David Attenborough

“I know of no pleasure deeper than that which comes from contemplating the natural world and trying to understand it.”
― David Attenborough

“We humans, alone on Earth, are powerful enough to create worlds, and then destroy them.”
― David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

“We ourselves (one single species) have taken over vast tracts of the inhabitable surface of the planet. Surely, we should allow those other creatures we share the planet with to retain some part of their ancient heritage.”
― David Attenborough

“Everything is set for us to win this future. We have a plan. We know what to do. There is a path to sustainability. It is a path that could lead to a better future for all life on Earth. We must let our politicians and business leaders know that we understand this, that this vision for the future is not just something we need, it is something, above all, that we want.”
― David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

“To restore stability to our planet, therefore, we must restore its biodiversity, the very thing we have removed. It is the only way out of this crisis that we ourselves have created. We must rewild the world!”
― David Attenborough

“All we require is the will. The next few decades represent a final opportunity to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. Our future on the planet, the only place as far as we know where life of any kind exists, is at stake.”
― David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

“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

“Now, over half of us live in an urban environment. My home, too, is here in the city of London. Looking down on this great metropolis, the ingenuity with which we continue to reshape the surface of our planet is very striking. It’s also very sobering, and reminds me of just how easy it is for us to lose our connection with the natural world.
Yet it’s on this connection that the future of both humanity and the natural world will depend. And surely, it is our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth.”
― David Attenborough

“We often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to save ourselves.”
― David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

“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, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

“With or without us, the wild will return. .... It seems that, however grave our mistakes, nature will be able to overcome them, given the chance. The living world has survived mass extinctions several times before. But we humans cannot assume that we will do the same.”
― David Attenborough

“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, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future