David Attenborough Quotes

It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.

I often have deer on my property and there's a fox and owls. You're not going to see that in the city.

A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be - will be - a human zoo. A high-tech slum.

Many of the birds Audubon painted are now extinct, and still we go on killing them, more or less casually, with our pesticides and wires and machinery.

There is something about seeing rhinos and lions running free that excites you. It's not that you feel afraid; it's more like you're liberated by seeing them.

The sad thing about destroying the environment is that we're going to take the rest of life with us. The bluebirds will be gone, and the elephants will be gone, and the tigers will be gone, and the pandas will be gone.

Gorillas are still wild creatures. That's made very clear when you observe them in nature. They charge and perform other displays that are terrifying by design. But they don't attack unless they feel threatened.

I think the Netherlands will become one big city at a point. It is inevitable when you live in a country with so many people. You cannot afford to leave nature as it is. Some people believe that the dunes should be left in their original state, but I think it's strange to let things become how they were 500 years ago.

In my garden, which is a big garden, I have one part that is my bird garden, and every morning, 365 days a year, they get buckets of food - for the birds, for the squirrels, the chipmunks and the turtles in the summer.

Almost all these hotspots around the world, most have been destroyed to the point where there is no wildlife and very little of the natural world left.

It may be a cliche, but cliche or not, I fear the day when the only marsh harriers or peregrines I can look at are in paintings by Joseph Wolf or Bruno Liljefors - and no matter how beautiful those works may be, life is the great thing: life, life, life.

We try to exile ourselves more and more from nature - not always consciously: We build houses; we dismiss nature; nature has to be outside, because we're inside. God forbid something like a cockroach comes inside, or some dust.

In Yellowstone National Park, there are more 'do not feed the animals' signs than there are animals you might wish to feed.

In Los Angeles, you drive around, and you're coming back from a club or something, and all of a sudden, you'll encounter a coyote. And they're very lean, hungry-looking animals.

I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it's a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.

Apart from the most obvious cases, like the Oriental Bittersweet vine, escaped from private gardens and smothering the mountains one acre at a time, the most painful proof of man's destruction is not what you can see right in front of you; it's what you will never see again.

The crown jewel of our national park system has been transformed into a hunting ground for these predators. It's just a matter of time before one of these snakes gets to a visitor.

I have made my home among the mountain gorillas.

Any observer is an intruder in the domain of a wild animal and must remember that the rights of that animal supersede human interests. An observer must also keep in mind that an animal's memories of one day's contact might well be reflected in the following day's behavior.

I love raccoons. I had a raccoon figurine collection as a kid, and I now have two movies with 'Ranger Rick' jokes in them. I love 'em. They come in my back yard all the time, and we just stare at each other like a couple of idiots.

When people encroach on forest land and in the periphery of habitats of wild animals, they attack humans.

I have lived long enough to witness the vanishing of wild mammals, butterflies, mayflies, songbirds and fish that I once feared my grandchildren would not experience: it has all happened faster than even the pessimists predicted.

In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterflies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.

Quite simply, our isolation from nature has become isolation from God's Word. Cocooned in our manmade world of climate-controlled homes, cars, subways, and high-rises, we're finding it easier to live as practical atheists.

I have this whole section in my oyster book where I talk about how New Yorkers have gotten divorced from the sea and completely forget that they live by the sea, and I suggest that this happened when they lost their oysters.