People are not going to care about animal conservation unless they think that animals are worthwhile.

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.

All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.

You know, it is a terrible thing to appear on television, because people think that you actually know what you're talking about.

All life is related. And it enables us to construct with confidence the complex tree that represents the history of life

I suspect that happiness is not a state but rather a transition.

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.