Jane Goodall Quotes

All animal life ultimately depends on plants if you think about

Understanding what chimpanzees are like has made me realize that we humans are not so different from other animals as we used to think. What makes us most different is that we are far more clever than even the cleverest chimp, and we have words. We have a spoken language. We can tell stories about what happened a week or a year or a decade ago. We can plan for the future, and we can discuss things - one person's idea can grow and change as other people contribute their ideas. Great ideas become greater, problems are solved.

THERE IS STILL SO MUCH IN THE WORLD WORTH FIGHTING FOR. SO MUCH THAT IS BEAUTIFUL, SO MANY WONDERFUL PEOPLE WORKING TO REVERSE THE HARM, TO HELP ALLEVIATE THE SUFFERING. AND SO MANY YOUNG PEOPLE DEDICATED TO MAKING THIS A BETTER WORLD. ALL CONSPIRING TO INSPIRE US AND TO GIVE US HOPE THAT IT IS NOT TOO LATE TO TURN THINGS AROUND, IF WE ALL DO OUR PART.

I had a letter from a fourteen-year-old the other day who was in a juvenile detention center. She wrote, ‘My life was a mess and I was on drugs, and I came here and I hated it. And then in the library I found a copy of My Life with the Chimpanzees. I never had a supportive mother, but when I read that book, I thought Jane can be my mother.’
“Her mother had never told her she could succeed. But when she read how my mother had supported me, and the difference that had made, she started to realize that she, too, could follow her dreams. I would be her role model — that’s what she meant by saying I could be her mother. She started behaving well, working hard — she turned her life around.”
I thought about this young woman, about the power of books and stories and role models to change a child’s life. And I thought about what Jane had said about how important our environment is and that our human nature is adaptable enough to fit into the world in which we must survive. How we can nurture our children is so very dependent on the larger community in which we live. There can be little doubt that the poverty, addiction, and hopelessness surrounding Robert White Mountain’s son contributed to his dying by suicide at sixteen.

The naturalist,” Jane said, “looks for the wonder of nature — she listens to the voice of nature and learns from nature as she tries to understand it. Whereas a scientist is more focused on facts and the desire to quantify. For a scientist, the question is, ‘Why is this adaptive? How does it contribute to the survival of the species?

Unfortunately, Doug, we have lost the long-term perspective, and we are suffering from an absurd and very unwise belief that there can be unlimited economic development on a planet of finite natural resources, focusing on short-term results or profits at the expense of long-term interests.

Or you agree with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin when he said, ‘We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

We’re not really a very intelligent species when we destroy our home.

I Starve my Belly for a Sublime Purpose

Three days
I starve my belly
so that it learns
to eat the sun.

I say to it: Belly,
I am ashamed of you. You must
spiritualize yourself. You must
eat the sun.

The belly keeps silent
for three days. It’s not easy
to waken in it higher aspirations.

Yet I hope for the best.
This morning, tanning myself on the beach,
I noticed that, little by little,
it begins to shine.

Let us learn to live in harmony with each other — between the people of different nations, cultures, and religions, and between us and Mother Earth. We're trying to grow a family of young people who move out into the world with shared values, who understand that although we may look different, although we may have different-colored skin, have different cultures, or wear different clothes — if we're sad, we cry, and the tears are the same. If we're happy, we laugh, and the laughter is the same. And within each of us, wherever we are, beats the same human heart.

Nature can win if we give her a chance.

How do we get people to heed the dire warnings of the people on the ground who have been fighting this danger for so long? How do we get them to take action?

Unfortunately, the media devotes so much space to covering all of the bad, hateful things that are going on and not enough to reporting about all the goodness and kindness that’s out there.

Here was a chimpanzee using a tool... That was object modification — the crude beginning of tool making.

This very real difference between GM plants and their conventional counterparts is one of the basic truths that biotech proponents have endeavoured to obscure. As part of the process, they portrayed the various concerns as merely the ignorant opinions of misinformed individuals – and derided them as not only unscientific, but anti-science.