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You can only get really unpopular decisions through if the electorate is convinced of the value of the environment. That's what natural history programmes should be for.

David Attenborough

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David Attenborough
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: May 8
Actor
Autobiographer
Biologist
Broadcaster
Director
Environmentalist
Film Director
Journalist
Naturalist
Presenter
Screenwriter
London
England
Sir David Attenborough
David Frederick Attenborough
Sir David Frederick Attenborough
Natural
Unpopular
History
Programmes
Really
Decisions
Convinced
Value
Environment
Decision
Values
Electorate

More quotes by David Attenborough

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I've never actually met one in the wild, but I have seen a king cobra. They go towards people, they rear up six feet tall and they're very aggressive and they are very fast. And one bite means certain death. So if I encountered a king cobra in the wild I would be very alarmed.
David Attenborough
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The fact is that no species has ever had such wholesale control over everything on earth, living or dead, as we now have. That lays upon us, whether we like it or not, an awesome responsibility. In our hands now lies not only our own future, but that of all other living creatures with whom we share the earth.
David Attenborough
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Fundamentally not to waste energy. If we were all to reduce our demands for energy, it would make an enormous amount of difference.
David Attenborough
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People talk about doom-laden scenarios happening in the future: they are happening in Africa now. You can see it perfectly clearly. Periodic famines are due to too many people living on land that can't sustain them.
David Attenborough
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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.
David Attenborough
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Nothing in the natural world makes sense - except when seen in the light of evolution
David Attenborough
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If I can make programmes when I'm 95, that would be fine. But I would think I'll have had enough by then.
David Attenborough
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I am an ardent recycler. I would like to think that it works. I don't know whether it does or not.
David Attenborough
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Television of course actually started in Britain in 1936, and it was a monopoly, and there was only one broadcaster and it operated on a license which is not the same as a government grant.
David Attenborough
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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.
David Attenborough
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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.
David Attenborough
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You'll find people where their conditions aren't changing in any way, its rather rare for them to be happy.
David Attenborough
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It's a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species.
David Attenborough
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How could I look my grandchildren in the eye and say I knew what was happening to the world and did nothing.
David Attenborough
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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.
David Attenborough
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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.
David Attenborough
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You have to steer a course between not appalling people, but at the same time not misleading them.
David Attenborough
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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.
David Attenborough
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I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.
David Attenborough
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All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.
David Attenborough