Jonathan Dimbleby Quotes

It is easy enough to hold an opinion, but rather more testing to act on it.

My only real claim to fame is that I was southern England show-jumping champion in 1966. The day after my father died, 'Horse & Hound' magazine tipped me as a future Olympic champion, and I took it seriously. You can only really enjoy something if you take it seriously.

The BBC produces wonderful programmes; it also produces a load of old rubbish.

Not every programme dealing with issues of global significance has to be fronted by last week's winner of Have I Got News For You-but I suppose you might be wrong.

I was obliged to play the piano, like middle-class children are. I didn't start to love it until I was 14.

Ethiopia is engraved on my heart. I first went in 1973 because I heard of a terrible famine. They were denying it even as we got the film out. The coverage destroyed the emperor's credibility.

The BBC has the obligation to think big. And at the moment, that clarion call sounds an uncertain note to me.

I don't love the media. I'm part of it, but you can't love a porcupine.

In the world in which we live, truth is an ancillary virtue, but it shouldn't be.

While I have corrected agreed factual errors, I have not been inhibited from writing what I felt to be the truth about The Prince of Wales.

Presidents and prime ministers, whether they live in the rich or the poor world, are insulated and isolated from the devastating impact of global poverty. They read the statistics, but they rarely witness at first hand the misery and degradation of life on a dollar a day.

I deplore the loss of arts on BBC One and Two.

I was born with a silver microphone in my mouth, and that was an advantage. My father wrote books and was also a great broadcaster.

Ever more people are alert to the challenge of global poverty and global warming. We know that solutions are at hand. We will not sleepwalk into catastrophe. We have the capacity to forsee and forestall, and I believe we will find the will to act

I fail to understand how you can justify a poll tax on the entire population, yet exclude a significant proportion of that population from programmes that this tax is paying for.

I cycle, I take an hour's strenuous walk in the evening, I play tennis twice a week with a trainer, and I sail. I used to ride horses professionally - I'd ride seven or eight horses a day, so I had to be fit for that.

As a young man, causes of one kind or another engaged me, and I thought the media is where you express yourself in that. I lived with the illusion, for quite a long time, that if you described something accurately, something would be done about it.

I ought to rejoice in the fact that our principal rival has died, but I don't.

I've never been a depressive, but I felt quite close to the edge at times. But you never know what's around the corner. Mercifully, what's around the corner is joy.

Anyone who thinks that you become a journalist or broadcaster in order to be a wallflower needs to think again.

At home in Devon, my wife Jessica does a huge proportion of the cooking - I do the basics. My timing is extremely good, particularly when it comes to vegetables, perhaps because in my work, timing is everything. I know exactly what fits into a minute when broadcasting, and I apply the same to carrots.

I honestly believe that TV generally is obsessed with the ratings battle to the point of cutting its own throat.

I hate flying. My stomach churns at the mere thought of it.

Food is about communal togetherness. Our family does sit at the table. I think it's a great tragedy if a family doesn't have a table, as there is such an atmosphere of good will and warmth when we have eight people sitting around it.

That test should not be about ratings. What should weigh is the knowledge that a public broadcaster delivers programmes that matter.

I had no expectation that the Prince would offer me the unprecedented and unfettered access to the original and entirely untapped sources on which this biography is based.

The challenge is the culture. You have to have a vision for the BBC-it can't merely be that it's big and has a place in the market.

I am now certain that we have no alternative but to reduce urgently the levels of carbon that we are still pumping into the atmosphere as though tomorrow simply didn't matter. If we don't act collectively and individually, our children and their children will reap a whirlwind which will obliterate their civilisation.

As it is, the grotesque distortions of the global market mean that for every dollar the West dispatches to Africa in the form of aid, two dollars are clawed back through subsidies and tariff barriers: a monumental rip-off by the rich as they instruct the poor to accept 'free' trade or else.

Until I was 21, I wasn't going into the media. I was a professional show jumper; I was going to have a farm ... Then my father died, and it changed my life. I realised I had to have a go at being a journalist to see if I could cut the mustard.

It's absolutely fine to think of new ways of doing things, and I'm not just asking for the traditional reporter to look into our living rooms night after night.

I was a reluctant convert, and I am by no means a zealot. But the evidence is compelling: to write off wind-power is either ill-informed or dishonest.