As I watched the pulsing fire among the trees and heard the beat of the drum merge and tremble with the voices, forming an intricate pattern of sound, I knew that someday I would have to return or be haunted forever by the beauty and mystery that is Africa.

My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.

The great ecosystems are like complex tapestries - a million complicated threads, interwoven, make up the whole picture. Nature can cope with small rents in the fabric; it can even, after a time, cope with major disasters like floods, fires, and earthquakes. What nature cannot cope with is the steady undermining of its fabric by the activities of man.

There is no first world and third world. There is only one world, for all of us to live and delight in.

Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.

When man continues to destroy nature, he saws the very branch on which he sits since the rational protection of nature is at the same time the protection of mankind

They were maps that lived, maps that one could study, frown over, and add to; maps, in short, that really meant something.