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.

Neither have I said we have got to do this because of some pharmaceutical advantage there may or may not be. The moral issue is that we should not impoverish this world.

People knew that animals were nocturnal but they didn’t really know what they did because they couldn’t see it.

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?

Nature isn’t positive in that way. It doesn’t aim itself at you. It’s not being unkind to you.

The climate, the economic situation, rising birth rates; none of these things give me a lot of hope or reason to be optimistic.

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.

I asked the airline staff what I was going to do with all the animals as I didn’t have any food for them. They were very unhelpful.

Very few species have survived unchanged. There’s one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it’s survived by...

Very few people in the history of biology could have seen as much of the actual things that I have, and the sad thing is that I do so little with it. I’m so busy...

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

There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it.

Steve Irwin did wonderful conservation work but I was uncomfortable about some of his stunts. Even if animals aren’t aware that you are not treating them with respect, the viewers are.

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...

Here we are with even the most obvious things like a fishing policy or a transport policy-we know what the consequences are.

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.

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

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...

If I do a series or tapes for the States and it’s sponsored by somebody for the public broadcast system, I am committed to going on tour around various stations.

I get Indian ring-necked parakeets in my garden every morning. There’s a big colony living wild down the road. There might be some out there now.

All we can hope for is that the thing is going to slowly and imperceptibly shift. All I can say is that 50 years ago there were no such thing as environmental policies.

My last trip was to the States, and on the way back I sat in the cockpit for take-off and landing. In a funny way, I think aircrew know that I’ve travelled a lot and...

The nighttime is a very active time.

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...

Cameramen are among the most extraordinarily able and competent people I know. They have to have an insight into natural history that gives them a sixth sense of what the creature is going to do,...

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

We’ve lived here for 38 years. This is where our kids were born, and this is my place. As far as I’m concerned, if I can’t have this, I don’t want anything.

We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves – and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case. Until humanity manages...

I mean, it is an extraordinary thing that a large proportion of your country and my country, of the citizens, never see a wild creature from dawn ’til dusk, unless it’s a pigeon, which isn’t...

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.

Oh, my capacity for guilt is enormous. I’m all the time thinking I’m not doing the things I should be doing, not doing enough of it, or I said I’d be vice-president of something or...

There is a shift… whether there will be some 180 turn-I don’t think there can possibly be. But I think that we might move away from some of the appalling materialist considerations which have governed...

I had a huge advantage when I started 50 years ago – my job was secure. I didn’t have to promote myself. These days there’s far more pressure to make a mark, so the temptation...

I am not over fond of animals.

I’m a very old BBC hand.

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’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...

Children start off reading in books about lions and giraffes and so on, but they also-if they’re lucky enough and have reasonable privileges of any human being-are able to go into a garden and turn...

I haven’t-touch wood-had a stomach upset for 15 or 20 years.

I don’t think we are going to become extinct. We’re very clever and extremely resourceful – and we will find ways of preserving ourselves, of that I’m sure. But whether our lives will be as...

I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature.

The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing.

It’s about cherishing the woodland at the bottom of your garden or the stream that runs through it. It affects every aspect of life.

I joined the BBC as a trainee. At first, the television service had no money and it was regarded as a rather raffish arm of the BBC.

In the old days… it was a basic, cardinal fact that producers didn’t have opinions. When I was producing natural history programmes, I didn’t use them as vehicles for my own opinion. They were factual...

How could anyone believe they actually deserved something like this? … I can only think that it is because I have been able to reach so many people through television.

Crying wolf is a real danger.

It is vital that there is a narrator figure whom people believe. That’s why I never do commercials. If I started saying that margarine was the same as motherhood, people would think I was a...

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.

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...