Here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that's ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain ... and yet we're destroying the only home we have.

there have been too many events in my life, and in the lives of my friends, which have defied any kind of scientific explanation. Science does not have appropriate tools for the dissection of the spirit.

We can learn to suppress our feelings for other reasons.

I believe that accurate knowledge is very, very important, but find that out in free time. Don't let it take over every hour of the day. Perhaps most important, talk about it.

I don't care two hoots about civilization. I want to wander in the wild.

Cultural speciation had been crippling to human moral and spiritual growth. It had hindered freedom of thought, limited our thinking, imprisoned us in the cultures into which we had been born. . . . These cultural mind prisons. . . . Cultural speciation was clearly a barrier to world peace. So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the ‘global village’ we would propagate prejudice and ignorance.

Chimpanzees are incredibly intelligent. They can learn more than 400 signs of American Sign Language. They have memories for spatial distribution, like numbers on a TV screen, way better than ours. You come onto the emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and despair - all the things for which I was accused of being anthropomorphic when I ascribed them to chimpanzees.