Jane Goodall Quotes

It's up to us to save the world for tomorrow: it's up to you and me.

In Tanzania, the chimps are isolated in a very tiny patch of forest. I flew over it 13 years ago and realized that, basically, all the trees had gone, that people all around the park are struggling to survive. It became very clear that there was no way to protect the chimps while the people were in this dire circumstance.

You may not believe in evolution, and that is all right. How we humans came to be the way we are is far less important than how we should act now to get out of the mess we have made for ourselves.

It may sound trite, but young people really are the future.

What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That's what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

We, as humans, have actually developed a sense of social responsibility. We have gone beyond our basic instincts. We can and we do. This is what sets us apart from the chimps. They are extremely brutal and hostile. Your next door neighbor is to be killed unless she is a juicy young female, who hasn't yet had her first baby, in which case you want her.

Words can be said in bitterness and anger, and often there seems to be an element of truth in the nastiness. And words don't go away, they just echo around.

They used to ask: "How will this decision that we make today affect our people in the future?" Now we make decisions based on: "How does it affect me, now? How does it affect the next shareholders meeting, three months ahead? How does it affect my next political campaign?"

There isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. All the time, we find animals doing things that, in our arrogance, we thought were just human.

We are always talking about how we can get more environmental and humanitarian education. It is about listening to the voice of young people - how they feel, and what would be most meaningful for them.

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.

The Soul of Money is an inspired and utterly fascinating book. It will change the way you think about money. ... It is a book for everyone who would like to make the world a better place.

If you really want something, and really work hard, and take advantage of opportunities, and never give up, you will find a way.. Follow your Dreams.

However much you know giraffes, to see one in the wild for the first time feels prehistoric.

Every individual matters and has a role to play in this life on Earth.

Without the heart to ground it and open it to who we really can be as human beings, the brain is a very dangerous machine. A machine that is saying: we've got to have economic growth; we've got to have unending economic growth, otherwise societies will collapse. And yet there should be something saying: wait a minute, this isn't going to work.

We find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think was "just human".

....I understood why those who had lived through war or economic disasters, and who had built for themselves a good life and a high standard of living, were rightly proud to be able to provide for their children those things which they themselves had not had. And why their children, inevitably, took those things for granted. It meant that new values and new expectations had crept into our societies along with new standards of living. Hence the materialistic and often greedy and selfish lifestyle of so many young people in the Western world, especially in the United States.

I don't think that faith, whatever you're being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained. And I don't want to explain this whole life business through truth, science. There's so much mystery. There's so much awe.

We are unique. Chimpanzees are unique. Dogs are unique. But we humans are just not as different as we used to think.

Science demands objective factual evidence - proof; spiritual experience is subjective and leads to faith.

The only possible way to get somebody to change is to reach into their hearts.

One cannot watch chimpanzee infants for long without realizing that they have the same emotional need for affection and reassurance as human children.

It's the bond between mother and child, which is really for us and for chimps and other primates, the root of all the expressions of social behavior.

Especially now when views are becoming more polarized, we must work to understand each other across political, religious and national boundaries.

Chimpanzees, more than any other living creature, have helped us to understand that there is no sharp line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. It's a very blurry line, and it's getting more blurry all the time.

Well, in some ways we're not successful at all. We're destroying our home. That's not a bit successful.

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking - all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.

If you educate women, family size tends to go down.

Nothing is more precious than your baby.

I think the best evenings are when we have messages, things that make us think, but we can also laugh and enjoy each other's company.

At some point, my body will collapse. But I hope that my brain will still be working so that I can carry on with writing.

The greatest danger to our future is apathy.

People say, "Oh, we ought to fight for animal rights." We fought for human rights, but even if humans have rights, they can still be horribly abused and are every day. You don't have to go to some far off land, far away place; we have a lot of child abuse in our own society.

If you work hard and be persistent, you will achieve whatever you want to do.

The problem of the chimps is that they can only sit and look. They can't discuss what they feel. All that feeling is trapped within each one.

Chimps are very quick to have a sudden fight or aggressive episode, but they're equally as good at reconciliation.

Chimpanzees can be quite political.

I had a wonderful teacher about animal behavior - my dog Rusty. He taught me that animals have personalities, minds, and feelings.

Chimpanzees have given me so much. The long hours spent with them in the forest have enriched my life beyond measure. What I have learned from them has shaped my understanding of human behavior, of our place in nature.

Primates are very territorial. It is in their nature to protect their food resources as well as their females and young.

The chimpanzees taught me a lot about nonverbal communication. The big difference between them and us is that they don't have spoken language. Everything else is almost the same: Kissing, embracing, swaggering, shaking the fist.

We, as humans, have actually developed a sense of social responsibility. We have gone beyond our basic instincts.

Without the support of local people, you might as well give up because you can make all the noise you like, you can demarcate a national park, but if the people outside want to go creeping into a forest you really can't stop them. They've got to get a benefit.

We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism, and love.

We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for 80% of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the 20% who are destroying our natural resources.

Louis [Leakey] was anxious to initiate a scientific study of these chimpanzees. It would be difficult, he emphasized, for nothing was known; there were no guidelines for such a field study; and the habitat was remote and rugged. Dangerous wild animals would be living there, and chimpanzees themselves were considered at least four times stronger than humans. I remember wondering what kind of scientist he would find for such a herculean task.