Jane Goodall Quotes

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?

You can’t do everything. You can’t do health and forestry and agriculture. You’ve got to focus and do one or the other.

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.

I sometimes wonder how some people can live with themselves in some of the big companies today. So many far-reaching decisions are based on how they will affect the next shareholders’ meeting.

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.

I want to change awareness.

As thy days, so shall thy strength be.

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.

To me, cruelty is the worst of human sins. Once we accept that a living creature has feelings and suffers pain, then by knowingly and deliberately inflicting suffering on that creature, we are guilty, whether it be human or animal.

If a chimp who has been abused horribly by humans can help a human friend in a time of need, how much more should we help the animals – and other people for that matter – in their time of need?

We seem to have lost the wisdom of the indigenous people, which dictated that in any major decision, the first consideration was ‘How will this decision we’re making today affect our people in the future? These days, decisions are made based on the bottom line.

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.