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.
Interpretation
The speaker differentiates between superficial affection for animals and a deeper, more profound admiration for them.
In this quote, David Attenborough expresses his view that true appreciation for animals goes beyond merely liking them or enjoying their physical presence. Instead, it conveys a more intense, almost intoxicating fascination with their behaviors and existence, highlighting the complexity and beauty of the natural world.
In practice
Using this quote at an animal rights rally to emphasize deeper connection with animals.
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 rich as they are now is another question.
I'm against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage.
I would be absolutely astounded if population growth and industrialisation and all the stuff we are pumping into the atmosphere hadn't changed the climatic balance. Of course it has. There is no valid argument for denial.
There's a small worm called Loa Loa Filariasis. This parasite can survive in one environment exclusively- namely, underneath the skin and inside the eyes of human beings. Children and the elderly in tropical regions (usually the poorest) are the most widely affected. A painful, slow death is virtually certain. The worm can actually live in the host for 17 years before the host finally dies.
The fundamental issue is the moral issue.
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 liar.
Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.
Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.
In most mills, only the best portions of the best trees are used, while the ruins are left on the ground to feed great fires which kill much of what is left of the less desirable timber, together with the seedlings on which the permanence of the forest depends.
Maybe nature is fundamentally ugly, chaotic and complicated. But if it's like that, then I want out.
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
We have an economy that tells us it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet.
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