A E Housman - Arthur Schopenhauer - Robert Browning - Georges Duhamel - David Attenborough TV - Horace Walpole - Moliere - William Shakespeare & Julius Caesar 1970 - The Matrix 1999 - The Sopranos TV - John Adams - Franklin D Roosevelt - William James - Bill Hicks - J Robert Oppenheimer - Henry Brooks Adams - Genius of Britain TV - Albert Einstein - Daniel C Dennett - John Milton - Thomas Hardy - Harriet Tubman - John Muir - Jordan Maxwell - Jim Morrison - Will Hutton - John Keats - Jimi Hendrix - Karl Marx - Richard Dawkins TV - William Blake - Lord Byron - Reginald Heber - David Icke - William Corey - Peter Ackroyd - Rab C Nesbitt TV - Rudolf Steiner - D H Lawrence - Stephen Collins Foster - Charles Dickens - Plato - Arthur Hugh Clough - Wolfgang von Goethe - T S Eliot - Richard Feynman - Wall Street 1987 - Brian Cox TV - Norman Borlaugh - Horizon TV - W H Auden - Michael Faraday - Matthew Arnold - Austin Powers 1997 - Anthony Newley & Leslie Bricusse - Voltaire - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Roald Dahl - Mark Twain - Marilyn Monroe - Hermann Hesse - Banksy - Karl Lagerfeld - Jack Kerouac - Pablo Picasso - Henry David Thoreau - Omar Khayyam - J R R Tolkien - Gustave Flaubert - Mahatma Gandhi - Martin Luther King - Albert Pike - Muhammad Ali - Supersized Earth TV - Charlie Chaplin - R D Laing - George Eliot - Dolly Parton - Yukio Mashima - Nelson Mandela - Ancient Aliens TV - Benjamin Spock - Percy Bysshe Shelley - Scarface 1983 - A Clockwork Orange 1971 - Croupier 1998 - Scarface 1932 - The Sound of Fury 1950 - Man From Tangier 1957 - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine TV - John F Kennedy - Mike Tyson - Napoleon Bonaparte - Hans Rosling TV - Paradise Lost 1937 - Bertrand Russell - John 1:10 - I Timothy 6:7 - John 1:10 - I Timothy 6:7 - I John 2:2&15-17 - Noam Chomsky -
Who made the world I cannot tell; ’tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed. A E Housman
And how am I to face the odds,
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made. A E Housman, Last Poems 1922
If a god made this world then I would not like to be the god. Its misery and distress would break my heart. Arthur Schopenhauer
God’s in his heaven
All’s right with the world. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes
Who knows but the world may end to-night? Robert Browning, Last Ride Together
I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world. Georges Duhamel, 1884-1966, French novelist
All societies have had need to find an explanation of the way in which human beings came into the world. David Attenborough, televised interview
If we [humans] disappeared overnight, the world would probably be better off. David Attenborough, The Daily Telegraph 2005
And that basic notion that the world is there for us ... has produced the devastation of vast areas of the land surface. David Attenborough, televised interview
The world is full of wonders. But they become more wonderful not less wonderful when Science looks at them. David Attenborough, Genius of Britain II: A Roomful of Brilliant Minds, Channel 4 2012
The natural world is the greatest of all treasures. And yet in my lifetime we have damaged it more severely than in the whole of the rest of the human history. David Attenborough: 60 Years in the Wild III: Our Fragile Planet, BBC 2012
Peter [Scott] had his own natural history series on television: it was called Look. ibid.
Life in Cold Blood 2008: The Giant Galapagos Tortoise – they live longer than any other animal on Earth, well over a hundred and fifty years. ibid.
Dian Fossey had been studying the Mountain Gorilla. ibid.
I actually witnessed the extinction in the wild of the Panamanian Golden Frog which fell victim to the same insidious killer. ibid.
I have been enthralled by coral reefs ever since. ibid.
The change is already beginning to be seen at the Poles. ibid.
We, after all, are the architects of the urban world. Now over half of us live in an urban environment … Yet it’s on this connection that the future of both humanity and the natural world depend. It is surely our responsibility to do everything in our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us but for all life on Earth. David Attenborough, Planet Earth s2e6: Cities, BBC 2016
Two hundred million years ago our planet looked very different than it does today. It was entirely covered by sea which surrounded one super continent we call Pangea. And then Pangea began to break up. Life was cast adrift on fragments of land. And these fragments eventually became our seven continents. David Attenborough, Seven Worlds, One Planet I: Antarctica, BBC 2019
We are changing the world so rapidly that wildlife is now facing of its greatest challenges yet. ibid.
Of all the continents, one was sighted by humans just two hundred years ago. ibid.
Only one mammal can live this far south: the Weddell seal. ibid.
One of the richest feeding grounds in all the world’s oceans. ibid.
The frozen surface of the sea hides a great secret: it may be hostile above the ice, but below it conditions are so stable that life over millennia has had time to diversify. Creatures here grow to a great size … ibid.
Asia: The largest of all the world’s continents. It stretches from the Equator to beyond the Arctic Circle. This is a continent of extremes. Here, temperatures can drop to bellow minus sixty degrees Celsius. On land, survival is almost impossible. But for a few weeks of summer the ice melts, and the coast is transformed. David Attenborough, Seven Worlds, One Planet II: Asia
Pacific walrus … 100,000 of them: almost the entire world population is here. They are gigantic. ibid.
Asia has the hottest deserts, highest mountains and tallest jungles on our planet. This is a continent of incredible variety. ibid.
Meet the blue-faced, golden-coated snug-nosed snow monkey. They are among the heftiest of monkeys … The whole group snuggles together at the slightest opportunity to keep warm. ibid.
The bird was mistaken. It was a viper with a lethal bite. This species has only recently been discovered … On its tail movable scales have been modified to look like a spider’s legs, and its tip like an abdomen. ibid.
At the southern tip of South America the Andes mountains rise almost vertically. Their very height affect life throughout the continent. The barren slopes look inhospitable. But like all parts of South America they are actually rich with wildlife. A family of Puma. They live further south than any kind of cat on Earth. David Attenborough, Seven World, One Planet III: South America
Here on the coast of Peru there are so many seabirds fishing in the offshore waters that the cliffs are covered in droppings over a metre thick. ibid.
The Andean bear: only a few thousand remain. They eat mostly leaves and fruit. ibid.
A few patches of forest still remain. One in Colombia is the home of one of the world’s rarest monkeys: cotton-topped tamarins. They are critically endangered. They live largely on fruit and are particularly fond of tree sap: this is packed with sugars, so it also attracts insects. ibid.
Once fledged, these young [parrots] will follow their parents for up to a year learning where to find the salts. ibid.
Anacondas are the largest of all snakes. They grow to over 200 kilos. And they usually stalk their prey from the water. ibid.
Australia: An island continent cast adrift during the time of the dinosaurs. Isolated from the rest of life on land for millions of years, the animals cast away here are today like none elsewhere. This is a land of survivors. David Attenborough, Seven Worlds, One Planet IV: Australia
The animals and plants here are armed: built to live alongside dinosaurs. ibid.
At nearly two metres tall, the cassowary rules this forest. ibid.
A little red flying fox … a wombat … kangaroos … dingoes … koalas … jumping spider … Reptiles: Australia has more species of them than any other continent … The wild budgerigar … Sharks: there are more species here than anywhere else on Earth … The Tasmanian devil … now endangered. ibid.
The driest inhabited continent on Earth. ibid.
Europe. Home to more than 700 million people. This is a continent that has been transformed by humanity. It is a crowded world. But not all of it. There are still precious areas of wilderness, and living within them, some very surprising animals. Forests once covered 80% of Europe. Now only half of it remains. A brown bear: one of only 1,500 that are left in Finland’s forest. David Attenborough, Seven World, One Planet V: Europe
Gibraltar: Home to Europe’s only monkeys. Barbary Macaques. Four family troops live here. ibid.