Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries.

Science is not just about finding answers; it’s about asking questions.

The power of one is often underestimated.

It’s important to listen to the voices of the youth.

We are all connected, and what we do affects everyone.

The awful thing is we don’t respect each other.

It’s not enough to be compassionate; we must act on that compassion.

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

One cannot be prepared for life; one must live it.

The greatest gift we can give to our children is a healthy planet.

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.

When we feel fear, we often react in ways that are destructive.

The future is in our hands.

So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the ‘global village’ we would propagate prejudice and ignorance. There was absolutely no harm in being part of a small group – indeed, with our hunter-gatherer band mentality it gave comfort, provided us with an inner circle of friends who could be utterly trusted, who were absolutely reliable. It helped give us peace of mind. The danger came only from drawing that sharp line, digging that ditch, laying that minefield, between our own group and any other group that thought differently.

Compassion is the basis of morality.

You can’t get away from your conscience.

We need to stop being so complacent about our role in the world.

Cultural speciation had been crippling to human moral and spiritual growth. It had hindered freedom of thought, limited our thinking, imprisoned us in the cultures into which we had been born. . . . These cultural mind prisons. . . . Cultural speciation was clearly a barrier to world peace. So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the ‘global village’ we would propagate prejudice and ignorance.

When I was 10 years old, I loved – I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan.

Without community service, we would not have a strong quality of life.

I am not deeply involved in Australian politics but I know there are prime ministers, governments around the world who are not acting responsibly in relation to climate change.

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.

Hope is the most important thing we have.

It is these undeniable qualities of human love and compassion and self-sacrifice that give me hope for the future. We are, indeed, often cruel and evil. Nobody can deny this. We gang up on each one another, we torture each other, with words as well as deeds, we fight, we kill. But we are also capable of the most noble, generous, and heroic behavior.

The environment is a complex web of relationships.

…very few Westerners, I thought, could tolerate such a way of life- for it would mean having to forgo the luxuries which we had come to think of as necessities.

I’m highly political. I spend an awful lot of time in the U.S. trying to influence decision-makers. But I don’t feel in tune with British politics.

Become as knowledgeable as possible.

I never wanted to be a scientist per se. I wanted to be a naturalist.

Every person has a story, and every story deserves to be heard.

As thy days, so shall thy strength be.

Women tend to be more intuitive, or to admit to being intuitive, and maybe the hard science approach isn’t so attractive. The way that science is taught is very cold. I would never have become a scientist if I had been taught like that.

My mission is to create a world where we can live in harmony with nature.

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.

We must work together to save the planet and its species.

It’s up to us to save the world for tomorrow: it’s up to you and me.

My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn’t have any money, because Africa was the ‘dark continent’, and because I was a girl.

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.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

In the end, we will conserve only what we love.

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

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.

The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.

To me, the future is a big, bright, beautiful place.

And always I have this feeling–which may not be true at all–that I am being used as a messenger.

Words can be said in bitterness and anger, and often there seems to be an element of truth in the nastiness. And words don’t go away, they just echo around.

Empathy is really important.. Only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony can we achieve our full potential.

I think my message to the politicians who have within their power the ability to make change is, ‘Do you really, really not care about the future of your great-grandchildren? Because if we let the world continue to be destroyed the way we are now, what’s the world going to be like for your great-grandchildren?’

I want to be a voice for the voiceless.

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

If you really want something, and really work hard, and take advantage of opportunities, and never give up, you will find a way.. Follow your Dreams.

It’s time we look at the world as a family.

I was brought up to understand Darwin’s theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

I believe that the way we treat animals is a reflection of our humanity.

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.

But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.

It was both fascinating and appalling to learn that chimpanzees were capable of hostile and territorial behavior that was not unlike certain forms of primitive human warfare.

For those who have experienced the joy of being alone with nature there is really little need for me to say much more; for those who have not, no words of mine can ever describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected.

Cumulatively small decisions, choices, actions, make a very big difference.

We are the most intelligent species, and we must use that intelligence to help others.

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?

When you meet chimps you meet individual personalities. When a baby chimp looks at you it’s just like a human baby. We have a responsibility to them.

I did this book ‘Harvest for Hope,’ and I learned so much about food. And one thing I learned is that we have the guts not of a carnivore, but of an herbivore. Herbivore guts are very long because they have to get the last bit of nutrition out of leaves and things.

The animals are my friends…and I don’t eat my friends.

A sense of calm came over me. More and more often I found myself thinking, “This is where I belong. This is what I came into this world to do.

I think we’re still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

Young people, when informed and empowered, when they realize that what they do truly makes a difference, can indeed change the world.

The part that always shocked me was the inter-community violence among the chimps: the patrols and the vicious attacks on strangers that lead to death. It’s an unfortunate parallel to human behavior – they have a dark side just as we do. We have less excuse, because we can deliberate, so I believe only we are capable of true calculated evil.

It is only when we understand that we are all connected that we can find the path to a better world

We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism, and love.

Animals have personalities and minds and emotions.

I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker – yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

My mother always taught us that if people don’t agree with you, the important thing is to listen to them. But if you’ve listened to them carefully and you still think that you’re right, then you must have the courage of your convictions.

What you do is not a drop in the ocean. It is the ocean in a drop.

One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.

I like some animals more than some people, some people more than some animals.

The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

We have a responsibility to take care of the planet.

Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.

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

Above all we must realize that each of us makes a difference with our life. Each of us impacts the world around us every single day. We have a choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place – or not to bother.

In 1975, when my students were kidnapped by rebels, I was accused of hiding instead of trying to save them, and of not giving enough money for their ransom. I wasn’t believed.

I have had an uneventful life, full of adventures.

You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

There are certain characteristics that define a good chimp mother. She is patient, she is protective but she is not over-protective – that is really important. She is tolerant, but she can impose discipline. She is affectionate. She plays. And the most important of all: she is supportive.

Let us develop respect for all living things. Let us try to replace violence and intolerance with understanding and compassion. And love.

Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest, living fantastic lives, never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. I would say that they have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment.

I think the most important thing we can do is to keep learning.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

We have the choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place–or not to bother.

Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.

I don’t spend that much time being introspective, believe it or not. All I know is that I grew up not questioning God because that’s how you are. God was there like the birds and the wind.

You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you.

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right.

The greatest danger to our future is apathy.

What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

You cannot share your life with a dog, as I had done in Bournemouth, or a cat, and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings.