Jane Goodall > Quotes

“I went to an empty henhouse [when I was four and a half], hid in the straw at the back, and waited, and the family had no idea where I was... My mother sees this excited little girl rushing toward the house all covered in straw. Instead of getting mad at me, which would've killed the excitement, she saw my shining eyes and sat down to hear this wonderful story of how a hen lays an egg.”
― Jane Goodall

“I had never been able to believe that God would give us poor frail humans only one chance at making it -- that we would be assigned to some kind of hell because we failed during one experience of mortal life. ... So the concepts of karma and reincarnation made logical sense to me.”
― Jane Goodall

“Peace starts within. (Jane Goodall).”
― Jane Goodall

“Cruelty is a terrible thing. I believe it is the worst human sin.”
― Jane Goodall

“Hope,” Jane said, “is what enables us to keep going in the face of adversity. It is what we desire to happen, but we must be prepared to work hard to make it so.”
― Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

“Or you agree with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin when he said, ‘We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
― Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

“When I was young, I knew that, somehow, I would go to Africa and live with animals. And I wanted to write books about them. I don't think I spent too much time wondering exactly how I would do it. I just felt sure that the right opportunity would somehow come. I didn't feel frustrated because I could not go a really long trip while Rusty was still alive. It would have seemed like a betrayal. And while I waited I went on learning.”
― Jane Goodall

“It was as though the plants wanted me to write a different kind of book and sent gentle roots deep into my brain. They wanted me to fully acknowledge their importance in human history, their amazing powers of healing, the nourishment they provide, their ability to harm if we misused them, and, ultimately, our dependence on the plant kingdom. The plants seemed to want me to share with the world my own understanding of their beingness, so that people might better honor them as important partners in so many of our endeavors.”
― Jane Goodall, Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants

“Only if we can understand, can we care. Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help, shall all be saved.”
― Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

“We’re not really a very intelligent species when we destroy our home.”
― Jane Goodall

“She says that people who wonder how you can have hope in seemingly hopeless situations, like a death camp, confuse hope with idealism. Idealism expects everything to be fair or easy or good. She says it's a defense mechanism not unlike denial or delusion. Hope, she says, does not deny the evil but is a response to it." I was beginning to see that hope was not just wishful thinking. It did take the facts and the obstacles into account, but it did not let them overwhelm or stop us. Certainly, this was true in many seemingly hopeless situations.”
― Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for an Endangered Planet

“If only we had listened to the scientists studying zoonotic diseases who have long warned that such a pandemic was inevitable if we continued to disrespect nature and disrespect animals. But their warnings fell on deaf ears. We didn’t listen and now we are paying a terrible price.”
― Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

“All animal life ultimately depends on plants if you think about”
― Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

“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.”
― Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

“My role in life is to give people hope, because if you run out of hope, we may as well give up.”
― Jane Goodall

“I see what you’re saying about the link between nature’s resilience and human resilience,” I said. “How addressing human injustices like poverty and gender oppression makes us better able to create hope for people and the environment. Our efforts to protect endangered species preserve biodiversity on the Earth—and when we protect all life, we inherently protect our own.”
― Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

“And so, relentlessly, the planet is being desecrated in the name of “progress,” on the one hand, and as a result of poverty, ignorance, and apathy, born of hopelessness and despair, on the other.
So long as never-ending economic growth remains the goal of our governments and our major financial institutions, and so long as the corporate bottom line continues to put immediate profit above the future of our children, and so long as so many of the world’s inhabitants continue to live in unalleviated poverty, the crimes against the natural world will continue.”
― Jane Goodall, Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants

“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?”
― Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

“One could argue that the human intellect was the greatest mistake in evolution—a mistake that is now threatening all life on the planet.”
― Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

“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?”
― Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

“The Buddhists believe that we can be reincarnated as animals-it depends on where we are on the path toward enlightenment. And, of course, both Hinduism and Buddhism believe in karma-if you suffer misfortune, you are paying for sins you did in a previous life.”
― Jane Goodall

“if they worked together physically, and united spiritually, they could achieve anything.”
― Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

“I had an experience in the whale nursery in Baja, Mexico, that moved me deeply. I noticed that one whale was extremely white, which our guide explained occurs with these whales as they get older. Its body and tail had numerous scratches and gouges, which usually come from years of defending babies from orcas that try to eat the young on their annual migration from Alaska to Baja. As the whale came closer, we could see many barnacles on its skin and a deep indentation in the back of the blowhole, which also were signs of an elder whale. Our guide said it was almost certainly a grandmother whale.
“The grandmother whale’s head popped up next to our boat as the swirling, bubbling water spilled away. She raised her chin toward the rail of our boat, and we began to stroke her silvery skin. Aside from the barnacles, her skin was smooth and spongy, as we could feel the soft blubber beneath. As we stroked her she rolled to her side, opening her mouth and showing us her baleen, a sign of relaxation. And then she looked at us with one of her beautiful eyes. What she could see of us as we stared down at her from the boat, smiling and laughing, I had no idea, but it was clear she felt safe and wanted to connect in these bays, where possibly during her lifetime we had almost exterminated her kind. I felt so moved that tears were rolling down my cheeks.
“Our guide was in the background saying, ‘This whale has forgiven us. She has forgiven us for who we were and is seeing who we are today.”
― Jane Goodall

“Here was a chimpanzee using a tool... That was object modification-- the crude beginning of tool making.”
― Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey

“Hope is a survival trait and without it we perish”
― Jane Goodall

“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.”
― 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

“It is of more than historical interest to reflect that Henry Ford modeled his assembly line car production after visiting a Chicago slaughterhouse in the early 1900s. He watched the suspended animals, legs shackled and heads downward, on a moving conveyor as they traveled from worker to worker, each of whom performed a step in the slaughtering process. Ford immediately saw that it was a perfect model for the automobile industry, creating an assembly method of building cars.

More than efficient, the slaughtering assembly line offered workers a newly found detachment in the whole messy business of killing animals. Animals were reduced to factory products and the emotionally deadened workers could see themselves as line workers rather than animal killers. Later, the Nazis used the same slaughterhouse model for their mass murders in the concentration camps. The factory-style assembly line became a way for Nazi soldiers to detach from the killing--seeing the victims as "animals," and themselves as workers. Henry Ford, a rampant anti-Semite, not only developed the assembly line method later used in the Holocaust, he openly admired the Nazis' efficiency. Hitler returned the admiration. The German leader considered "Heinrich Ford" a comrade-in-arms and kept a life-sized portrait of the automobile mogul in his office at the Nazi Party headquarters.”
― Jane Goodall

“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.”
― Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

“Nature can win if we give her a chance.”
― Jane Goodall