Primates need good nutrition, to begin with. Not only fruits and plants, but insects as well.

The greatest problem we face is the growing number of people living in poverty. The related sense of hopelessness has to be impacting on every part of environmental management.

In the area of species protection, we should concern ourselves with what is right as opposed to what might be easier, or popular in the short term.

To me it's a question of being able to look backward and give the present a root... To give meaning to where we are today, we need to look at where we have come from.

Paleoanthropology is not a science that ends with the discovery of a bone. One has to have the original to work with. It is a life-long task.

I have been raised to believe in freedom of thought and speech. If a minority wishes to accept that position it's their right. What I fear is that this minority may seem to be larger than it truly is. What is strange is that there are still people who believe the world is not a globe.

It has taken biologists some 230 years to identify and describe three quarters of a million insects; if there are indeed at least thirty million, as Erwin (Terry Erwin, the Smithsonian Institute) estimates, then, working as they have in the past, insect taxonomists have ten thousand years of employment ahead of them. Ghilean Prance, director of the Botanical Gardens in Kew, estimates that a complete list of plants in the Americas would occupy taxonomists for four centuries, again working at historical rates.