Quotes from Jane Goodall

On the day-long follows that I used to do with mothers and their offspring - these chimp families that I knew so well - there was hardly a day when I didn't learn something new about them.

People say maybe we have a soul and chimpanzees don't. I feel that it's quite possible that if we have souls, chimpanzees have souls as well.

When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I'd caused the dragonfly to be killed.

My hope for the future is that we learn wisdom again.

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 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.

The chimpanzee study was - well, it's still going on, and I think it's taught us perhaps more than anything else to be a little humble; that we are, indeed, unique primates, we humans, but we're simply not as different from the rest of the animal kingdom as we used to think.

As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn't have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job.

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

Certainly it's very often true that women tend to be a bit quieter and more prepared to sit there and let the animal tell you things.

Mainly because as women's education increases all around the planet, we find that family size tends to drop.

it honestly didn't matter how we humans got to be the way we are, whether evolution or special creation was responsible. What mattered and mattered desperately was our future development. Were we going to go on destroying God's creation, fighting each other, hurting the other creatures of the His planet?

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

And I thought how sad it was that, for all our sophisticated intellect, for all our noble aspirations, our aggressive behavior was not just similar in many ways to that of the chimpanzees – it was even worse. Worse because human beings have the potential to rise above their baser instincts, whereas chimpanzees probably do not.

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.

Oh, the world needs those standing on the Bridge, For they know how Eternity reaches to earth In the wind that brings music to the leaves Of the forest: in the drops of rain that caress The sleeping life of the desert: in the sunbeams Of the first spring day in an alpine meadow. Only they can blow the dust from the seeing eyes Of those who are blind.

People said, Jane, forget about this nonsense with Africa. Dream about things you can achieve.

Only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony can we achieve our true potential.

But let us not forget that human love and compassion are equally deeply rooted in our primate heritage, and in this sphere too our sensibilities are of a higher order of magnitude than those of chimpanzees.

We still have a long way to go. But we are moving in the right direction. If only we can overcome cruelty, to human and animal, with love and compassion we shall stand at the threshold of a new era in human moral and spiritual evolution—and realize, at last, our most unique quality: humanity.

There is a powerful force unleashed when young people resolve to make a change.

How can you stop yourself from yelling and shouting and accusing everyone of cruelty? The easy answer is that the aggressive approach simply doesn't work.

Most of us don't realize the difference we could make. We love to shrug off our own responsibilities, to point fingers at others. Surely, we say, the pollution, waste, and other ills are not our fault. They are the fault of the industry, business, science. They are the fault of the politicians, This leads to a destructive and potentially deadly apathy.

like our intellect, social media in itself is neither good nor bad—it is the use to which we put it that counts.