Dame Jane Morris Goodall DBE, formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. She is a famous animal rights activist and environmentalist. Goodall made many discoveries in her long term research into chimpanzee society about their behavior, diet and interactions with one another. Wise Jane Goodall quotes will warm your heart, enlighten your mind and inspire you to celebrate the environment.
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Most Famous Jane Goodall Quotes
What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make. – Jane Goodall
The greatest danger to our future is apathy. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have? – Jane Goodall
Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference. – Jane Goodall
Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right. – Jane Goodall
I never wanted to give up. I thought I might have to. Especially at the beginning when chimpanzees had never seen a white person before.They gave one look at me and ran away! They were scared, but eventually I got their trust. – Jane Goodall
Every stage of my life set the scene for the next, and at each point all I had to do was say “yes” and not think too much about the consequences. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
We can have a world of peace. We can move toward a world where we live in harmony with nature. Where we live in harmony with each other. No matter what nation we come from. No matter what our religion. No matter what our culture. This is where we’re moving towards. – Jane Goodall
My job now is to try and help people understand every one of us makes a difference. And cumulatively, wise choices in how we act each day can begin to change the world. – Jane Goodall
Whatever we believe about how we got to be the extraordinary creatures we are today is far less important than bringing our intellect to bear on how do we get together now around the world and get out of the mess that we’ve made. That’s the key thing now. Never mind how we got to be who we are. – Jane Goodall
Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved. – Jane Goodall
One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun. – Jane Goodall
We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism, and love. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
If we do not do something to help these creatures, we make a mockery of the whole concept of justice. – Jane Goodall
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? – Jane Goodall
The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
Short Jane Goodall Quotes
Lasting change is a series of compromises. And compromise is all right, as long your values don’t change. – Jane Goodall
I think the best evenings are when we have messages, things that make us think, but we can also laugh and enjoy each other’s company. – Jane Goodall
And always I have this feeling–which may not be true at all–that I am being used as a messenger. – Jane Goodall
People said, Jane, forget about this nonsense with Africa. Dream about things you can achieve. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
We find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think wasjust human. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
Without patience I could never have succeeded. – Jane Goodall
As thy days, so shall thy strength be. – Jane Goodall
There is a powerful force unleashed when young people resolve to make a change. – Jane Goodall
Only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony can we achieve our true potential. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other. – Jane Goodall
We have the choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place–or not to bother. – Jane Goodall
That is our hope. Because if we all start listening and helping, then surely, together, we can make the world a better place for all living things. Can’t we? – Jane Goodall
Cruelty is a terrible thing. I believe it is the worst human sin. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
My mission is to create a world where we can live in harmony with nature. – Jane Goodall
If you really want something, and really work hard, and take advantage of opportunities, and never give up, you will find a way. – Jane Goodall
That I did not fail was due in part to patience. – Jane Goodall
I wanted to talk to the animals like Dr. Doolittle. – Jane Goodall
Chimpanzees have given me so much. The long hours spent with them in the forest have enriched my life beyond measure. What I have learned from them has shaped my understanding of human behavior, of our place in nature. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
Lasting change is a series of compromises. And compromise is all right, as long your values don’t change. – Jane Goodall
Anyone who tries to improve the lives of animals invariably comes in for criticism from those who believe such efforts are misplaced in a world of suffering humanity. – Jane Goodall
I think empathy is really important, and I think only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony can we achieve our full potential. – Jane Goodall
Let us develop respect for all living things. Let us try to replace violence and intolerance with understanding and compassion. And love. – Jane Goodall
To reconnect with nature is key if we want to save the planet. – Jane Goodall
If we kill off the wild, then we are killing a part of our souls. – Jane Goodall
Inspirational Jane Goodall Quotes
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. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
Thousands of people who say they love animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that could make their lives worth living and who endured the awful suffering and the terror of the abattoirs. – Jane Goodall
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, aspets,for food, in research laboratories, or any of the other uses to which we subject them. – Jane Goodall
People say to me so often,Jane how can you be so peaceful when everywhere around you people want books signed, people are asking these questions and yet you seem peaceful,and I always answer that it is the peace of the forest that I carry inside. – Jane Goodall
Especially now when views are becoming more polarized, we must work to understand each other across political, religious and national boundaries. – Jane Goodall
How would I have turned out, I sometimes wonder, had I grown up in a house that stifled enterprise by imposing harsh and senseless discipline? Or in an atmosphere of overindulgence, in a household where there were no rules, no boundaries drawn? My mother certainly understood the importance of discipline, but she always explained why some things were not allowed. Above all, she tried to be fair and to be consistent. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
I do not want to discuss evolution in such depth, however, only touch on it from my own perspective: from the moment when I stood on the Serengeti plains holding the fossilized bones of ancient creatures in my hands to the moment when, staring into the eyes of a chimpanzee, I saw a thinking, reasoning personality looking back. 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. – Jane Goodall
In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes. – Jane Goodall
Researchers find it very necessary to keep blinkers on. They don’t want to admit that the animals they are working with have feelings. They don’t want to admit that they might have minds and personalities because that would make it quite difficult for them to do what they do; so we find that within the lab communities there is a very strong resistance among the researchers to admitting that animals have minds, personalities, and feelings. – Jane Goodall
Thinking back over my life, it seems to me that there are different ways of looking out and trying to understand the world around us. There’s a very clear scientific window. And it does enable us to understand an awful lot about what’s out there. There’s another window, it’s the window through which the wise men, the holy men, the masters, of the different and great religions look as they try to understand the meaning in the world. My own preference is the window of the mystic. – Jane Goodall
There are an awful lot of scientists today who believe that before very long we shall have unraveled all the secrets of the universe. There will be no puzzles anymore. To me it’d be really, really tragic because I think one of the most exciting things is this feeling of mystery, feeling of awe, the feeling of looking at a little live thing and being amazed by it and how its emerged through these hundreds of years of evolution and there it is and it is perfect and why. – Jane Goodall
I sometimes think that the chimps are expressing a feeling of awe, which must be very similar to that experience by early people when they worshiped water and the sun, things they didn’t understand. – Jane Goodall
If you look through all the different cultures. Right from the earliest, earliest days with the animistic religions, we have sought to have some kind of explanation for our life, for our being, that is outside of our humanity. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
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. – Jane Goodall
I do have reasons for hope: our clever brains, the resilience of nature, the indomitable human spirit, and above all, the commitment of young people when they’re empowered to take action. – Jane Goodall
Together we can ensure that captive chimpanzees have a better life. Together we can save wild chimpanzees in their forest homes. – Jane Goodall
Animals help me survive my days of travel. As I go place to place around the world, I take note and remember well those animals I’ve gotten to meet along the way. – Jane Goodall
I’ve lived in this world for more than 84 years and I did indeed live in a different era and live through different eras to the one which you are going to enter today… I’ve had an extraordinary journey through my 84 years. It’s something I could never have imagined when I was young and during the journey many people have supported me. We can’t do it alone. It’s really important to build our friendships. – Jane Goodall
Surely, we do not want to live in a world without the great apes, our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom. A world where we can no longer marvel at the magnificent flight of bald eagles or hear the howl of wolves under the moon? A world not enhanced by the sight of a grizzly bear and her cubs hunting for berries in the wilderness? What would our grandchildren think if these magical images were only to be found in books? – Jane Goodall
I’ve spent my life speaking out on behalf of animals. And there is one issue that stands out uniquely as one of the worst threats to their survival. The illegal wildlife trade… Without doing something today, we could face a world in which thousands and thousands of species go silent. Never to return. But there is something we can do today, and it will take all of us working together to make it possible. – Jane Goodall
The advice I give to young people today is exactly what my mother gave to me when I was 10 and I said I’m going to grow up go to Africa, live with wild animals and write books about them. Everybody laughed. How could I do that? We didn’t have any money. World War II was raging. I was just a girl. But my mother always said, ‘If you really want something, you’re going to have to work hard, you’ll have to take advantage of every opportunity but don’t give up.’ I’ve taken that message to young people…all around the world. – Jane Goodall
We also had a session on conditions in some captive situations, secretly filmed footage of the pre-training of circus entertainment chimps. Little infants being beaten and medical research labs. Our closest relatives in 5ft by 5ft cages and I went to that conference as a scientist, I built up a research station, my life was better than anything I could have dreamed of. I had time to be in the rainforest and with the chimps, who by then I knew so, so well. They were almost like, it wasn’t family, I can’t describe it, but very close and I left as an activist. I didn’t make a conscious decision; I just knew I had to do something. – Jane Goodall
I’m 300 days a year on the road. I’m talking about what we’re doing to our planet, how we’re destroying the forests, we’re polluting the ocean and the air and the rivers, we are spraying poisonous chemicals on our food, with our pesticides and herbicides. I have to work with young people today so that we try and raise new generations to look after this poor old planet better than we have, before it’s too late. – Jane Goodall
