David Attenborough
David Attenborough
Sir David Frederick Attenborough OM CH CVO CBE FRS FLS FZS FSA is an English broadcaster and naturalist...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionTV Show Host
Date of Birth8 May 1926
CityIsleworth, England
optimistic birth-rate giving
The climate, the economic situation, rising birth rates; none of these things give me a lot of hope or reason to be optimistic.
fables natural natural-history
Natural history is not about producing fables.
bird spiders monkeys
What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it.
animal people needs
The more you go on, the less you need people standing between you and the animal and the camera waving their arms about.
taken years sea
Birds were flying from continent to continent long before we were. They reached the coldest place on Earth, Antarctica, long before we did. They can survive in the hottest of deserts. Some can remain on the wing for years at a time. They can girdle the globe. Now, we have taken over the earth and the sea and the sky, but with skill and care and knowledge, we can ensure that there is still a place on Earth for birds in all their beauty and variety - if we want to... And surely, we should.
mean thinking careers
If I were beginning my career today, I don't think I would take the same direction. Television is at a crossroads at the moment. And although I am not up to date technologically, I suspect that somewhere out there people are conveying things about natural history by means other than television, and I think if I were beginning today, I'd be there.
running sitting half
I don't like rats, but there's not much else I don't like. The problem with rats is they have no fear of human beings, they're loaded with foul diseases, they would run the place given half the chance, and I've had them leap out of a lavatory while I've been sitting on it.
way aim unkind
Nature isn't positive in that way. It doesn't aim itself at you. It's not being unkind to you.
world way evolution
As far as I'm concerned, if there is a supreme being then He chose organic evolution as a way of bringing into existence the natural world... which doesn't seem to me to be necessarily blasphemous at all.
lying manipulate
We can now manipulate images to such an extrodinary extent that there's no lie you cannot tell.
running clever numbers
Human beings, because we're so clever, have removed every single one of those population limiting factors... So nothing controls our increase in numbers except our own wish. Since I first started making television programs, the population of the world has increased three times. That's an extraordinary notion. Can it increase four times? Can it increase five times? The Earth is a finite size. So a point will eventually come when we run out of food, when we run out of space and when we will have destroyed most of the natural world. So ought we to do something about it before that happens?
mean cry inevitable
You can cry about death and very properly so, your own as well as anybody else's. But it's inevitable, so you'd better grapple with it and cope and be aware that not only is it inevitable, but it has always been inevitable, if you see what I mean.
views humanity planets
Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a co-ordinated view about the planet, it's going to get worse and worse.
silly animal python
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.