John Burroughs Quotes

My favourite animal is the koala, but his life would be boring. I would rather be a giraffe so that I could contemplate the beauty of Africa.

Working with crocodiles is always amazing because they're beautiful. They're modern day dinosaurs, which is really cool.

I weren't an actor, I'd be a wildlife biologist or forest ranger.

Life histories tell you just about everything you need to know about an animal.

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.

If the spotted owl can't adjust ... then screw it.

… monkeys …

I will be doing a film called Whispers, for Disney. It's about elephants, and doesn't have any people in it. It will be a live action film - I don't know how much I can say about it, since I still don't know too much about it.

To many people, 'biodiversity' is almost synonymous with the word 'nature,' and 'nature' brings to mind steamy forests and the big creatures that dwell there. Fair enough. But biodiversity is much more than that, for it encompasses not only the diversity of species, but also the diversity within species.

So it is that one side effect of the HD revolution has been the gratifying and edifying return of the nature documentary - films about the hugely varied forms of life that eat, sleep, stalk, mate, fight, thrive, suffer and struggle on our dear and embattled old Earth.

Habitats keep evolving new pageants of species, and we shouldn't interfere.

Turtles are very stable and have been around forever. But they have problems adapting. When humans came along, turtles came under serious threat. Biodiversity is good, and I think it is good in technology as well.

Biodiversity starts in the distant past and it points toward the future.

Extinction was a difficult concept for a 10-year-old.

When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.

I've always had a natural affiliation with nature. If I wasn't an actor, I'd be some sort of biologist working in the field in Africa or something.

Elephants are contagious.

It's fair to say when you go out and walk in the woods or on a beach, the most conspicuous forms of life you will see are plants and animals, and certainly there's a huge diversity of those types of organisms, perhaps 10 million animal species and several hundred thousand plant species.

You know, tigers are very unpredictable.

As I started to research gorillas, I began to understand that they're all totally individual and idiosyncratic, and they have their own personalities.

One of the basic steps in saving a threatened species is to learn more about it: its diet, its mating and reproductive processes, its range patterns, its social behavior.

In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found.

I like squirrels. They're so adventurous.

I actually taught perceptual psychology at N.Y.U. when I was younger. I was interested in the aesthetic impulse in lower primates. But what really interested me in Dian Fossey was that she made a difference - she saved the gorillas.

I like all these little animals that run and eat and hide all the time. I like their faces, They seem to be scared and curious at the same time.