I don't think we're going to save anything if we go around talking about saving plants and animals only; we've got to translate that into what's in it for us.

According to Johnny Carson, I was the guy who Marlon sent out to do all the dirty work.

Johnny Carson started the jokes about me and Marlin in his monologues.

Almost all these hotspots around the world, most have been destroyed to the point where there is no wildlife and very little of the natural world left.

The most powerful argument of all for saving open space is economics; in most states, tourism is the number two industry.

I don't want to save a creek for the creek's sake, but what's in it for human beings.

I don't think we're going to save anything if we go around talking about saving plants and animals only; we've got to translate that into what's in it for us.

Marlon was more of a formal zoo director type.

Preserving a river or a creek can bring a lot of revenue.

The quicker we humans learn that saving open space and wildlife is critical to our welfare and quality of life, maybe we'll start thinking of doing something about it.

I had travelled pretty widely around the world even before then, so I knew where to go to film wildlife.

I was amazed at the house that I grew up in; it looks practically identical to the way it was, but I couldn't recognize it because of the size of the trees.

I have a lot of memories of Falls Church. I went to grade school in Madison Elementary School.

But I'll tell you what, there was a lot of farmland between Falls Church and Washington.

My father was a soil scientist with the Geological Survey.

There's no denying that television is one of the most powerful propaganda media we've ever invented.

I'm a little different from all those conservation types.

Along 4 Mile Run, there was a nice woods down in front of the house. I used to run around there.

How we treat the earth basically effects our social welfare and our national security.

Most of what you see now emphasizes animals being dangerous to humans.

I always said it was to be dumb enough to do what Marlon Perkins said to do.

Somali is turning into a desert. Rwanda, you can hardly find a place to plant a potato, it's so crowded.

The continued existence of wildlife and wilderness is important to the quality of life of humans.

The other thing is quality of life; if you have a place where you can go and have a picnic with your family, it doesn't matter if it's a recession or not, you can include that in your quality of life.

We used to play baseball back in that field and keep an eye out for the bulls.

There's no country in the world that's more devastated from natural resources than Afghanistan.

Haiti looks like a bomb hit it.

The biggest challenge is how to affect public attitudes and make people care.

We moved over to Silver Spring, actually near University Park.

I remember very much there in Falls Church there was a creek that was flowing down into 4 Mile Run. I believe it's now covered up where it goes under Columbia Street. I found a whole family of weasels down there.

Everybody has a camcorder now, and they exploit these incidents and blow them all out of proportion.

That's really the challenge of this century, to develop spokespeople.

Sooner or later we've got to tie the saving of the natural world to our own public welfare.

The Zambesi is a big river; there's no crocodiles on 4 Mile Run.

Then a neighbor, Mr Smith, had a dairy cow and an couple bulls. He showed me how to bluff a bull.

Our challenge for the future is that we realize we are very much a part of the earth's ecosystem, and we must learn to respect and live according to the basic biological laws of nature.

My father being an outdoors person, he used to take us on quite a few adventures thorugh the wild areas down there, introducing us to alligators and rattlesnakes and all the trees and plants.

Man has done a lot to make himself dangerous and animals get the worst of all of it. But then, man too is an animal.

Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.

When I see professional clowns, mimes, or people who makes ballon animals, I think of their relatives and how disappointed they must be.

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.

Hence the same instant which killed the animals froze the country where they lived. This event was sudden, instantaneous, without any gradual development.

Towns are suffering from all these things, we should unite until we are all satisfied, man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals, as if we had no culture; that is a lack of culture.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

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.

I've always been fascinated by the way that children and animals suffer stoically in a way that I don't think adults do.

Ever occur to you why some of us can be this much concerned with animals suffering? Because government is not. Why not? Animals don't vote.

Animals are reliable, many full of love, true in their affections, predictable in their actions, grateful and loyal. Difficult standards for people to live up to.