It's been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don't suppose anybody really understands yet.

I cannot remember a time when I did not want to go to Africa to study animals.

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for themselves.

If you do microcredit with men, they tend to quickly drink it. They don't pay you back.

I think I'd like to be remembered as someone who really helped people to have a little humility and realize that we are part of the animal kingdom not separated from it.

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right.