David Attenborough

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

I don't run a car, have never run a car. I could say that this is because I have this extremely tender environmentalist conscience, but the fact is I hate driving.

We really need to kick the carbon habit and stop making our energy from burning things. Climate change is also really important. You can wreck one rainforest then move, drain one area of resources and move onto another, but climate change is global.

It is that range of biodiversity that we must care for - the whole thing - rather than just one or two stars.

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.

I think a major element of jetlag is psychological. Nobody ever tells me what time it is at home.

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

I think we're lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse.

If I can bicycle, I bicycle.

The fundamental issue is the moral issue.

Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?

We are a plague on the Earth.

I like animals. I like natural history. The travel bit is not the important bit. The travel bit is what you have to do in order to go and look at animals.

Birds are the most popular group in the animal kingdom. We feed them and tame them and think we know them. And yet they inhabit a world which is really rather mysterious.

I'm against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage.

The most extraordinary thing about trying to piece together the missing links in the evolutionary story is that when you do find a missing link and put it in the story, you suddenly need all these other missing links to connect to the new discovery. The gaps and questions actually increase - it's extraordinary.

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

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've been to Nepal, but I'd like to go to Tibet. It must be a wonderful place to go. I don't think there's anything there, but it would be a nice place to visit.

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

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.

I'm swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune.

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

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

To suggest that God specifically created a worm to torture small African children is blasphemy as far as I can see. The Archbishop of Canterbury doesn't believe that.

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

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

Getting to places like Bangkok or Singapore was a hell of a sweat. But when you got there it was the back of beyond. It was just a series of small tin sheds.

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.

Many individuals are doing what they can. But real success can only come if there is a change in our societies and in our economics and in our politics.

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.

An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment.

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.