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The notion of ever more old people needing ever more young people, who will in turn grow old and need even more young people, and so on ad infinitum, is an obvious ecological Ponzi scheme.

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
Ever
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More quotes by David Attenborough

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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 to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it’s going to get worse and worse.
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I can mention many moments that were unforgettable and revelatory. But the most single revelatory three minutes was the first time I put on scuba gear and dived on a coral reef. It's just the unbelievable fact that you can move in three dimensions.
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What humans do over the next 50 years will determine the fate of all life on the planet.
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They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.
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Can a growing human population still leave space for wildlife?
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If my grandchildren were to look at me and say, 'You were aware species were disappearing and you did nothing, you said nothing', that I think is culpable. I don't know how much more they expect me to be doing, I'd better ask them.
David Attenborough
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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 being unobtrusive and doing nothing, and you can't accuse human beings of that.
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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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What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it.
David Attenborough
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I suffer much less than many of my colleagues. I am perfectly able to go to Australia and film within three hours of arrival.
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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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?
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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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An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment...
David Attenborough
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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 programmes.
David Attenborough
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I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation our appearance in the world should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.
David Attenborough
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Terrorism is an immediate problem that people are very concerned about, and I am as concerned about that as anyone else. But it isn't an either or situation.
David Attenborough
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Before the BBC, I joined the Navy in order to travel.
David Attenborough
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Getting to places like Bangkok or Singapore was a hell of a sweat. But when you got there it was the back of beyond. It was just a series of small tin sheds.
David Attenborough
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Since when has Finland been a rotten place to live in?
David Attenborough