Jane Goodall Quotes - Page 6

Someday we shall look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons?

We now know that the structure of the DNA in humans and chimpanzees differs by only just over one percent. You could even have a blood transfusion from a chimp, provided you have the same blood group.

Every individual can make a difference every day by making conscious choices.

I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in '86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.

The more we spread the word, the further it will go and more it will change!

Even chimps understand the concept - if a troop of chimps enters a fruit tree, they will only pick the fruits that are ripe and leave the others growing. That is sustainability.

A book came out recently written by scientists and environmentalists that made me so angry. It said the only thing we have to worry about is big industry. Each individual who tries to make his or her own environment better is useless. I find this criminal, because then you have a billion people all saying, It doesn't matter what I do because I'm just one person. But if you turn that around and a billion people say, What I do does make a difference, then it will make a difference.

Lasting change is a series of compromises. And compromise is all right, as long your values don't change.

We can learn to suppress our feelings for other reasons.

I believe the only hope for mankind lies in the hands of our young people.

The more we learn of the true nature of non-human animals, especially those with complex brains and corresponding complex social behavior, the more ethical concerns are raised regarding their use in the service of man - whether this be in entertainment, as "pets," for food, in research laboratories, or any of the other uses to which we subject them.

....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'm always pushing for human responsibility. Given that chimpanzees and many other animals are sentient and sapient, then we should treat them with respect.

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.

We have turned away from the natural world. Instead, it's all about money and power.

There would be very little point in my exhausting myself and other conservationists themselves in trying to protect animals and habitats if we weren't at the same time raising young people to be better stewards.

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.

You have to really care about what you say. And if you don't, it will never come out quite right, unless you go into acting, in which case you have to act fast before you realize it is something which you do not believe in.

Words can enhance experience, but they can also take so much away. We see an insect and at once we abstract certain characteristics and classify it - a fly. And in that very cognitive exercise, part of the wonder is gone. Once we have labeled the things around us we do not bother to look at them so carefully. Words are part of our rational selves, and to abandon them for a while is to give freer reign to our intuitive selves.

Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive.

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

I feel a desperation to make people see what we are doing to the environment, what a mess we are making of our world. At this point, the more people I reach, the more I accomplish. ... I miss Gombe and my wonderful years in the forest But if I were to go back to that, I wouldn't feel I was doing what I should be doing.

We started off with physical evolution and got our form. Then we somehow developed language, which meant cultural evolution could race so we could change our behavior really quickly instead of over hundreds and hundreds of years. And then comes moral evolution, which means we're not frightfully far along with people. And maybe we end up with a spiritual evolution, which is this connectedness with the rest of the life forms on the planet.

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

I believe sharing stories and experiences is the best way to teach people to empathize!