400 Quotes by 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.

I learnt from Flo how to be mother. Flo was patient, tolerant. She was supportive. She was always there. She was playful. She enjoyed having her babies, as good mothers do.

I've watched a lot of people who became famous who completely change and I think it's because they tend to believe all the hype that's out there. I don't think there's that much hype about me.

I've always felt you don't have to be completely detached, emotionally uninvolved to make precise observations. There's nothing wrong with feeling great empathy for your subjects.

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

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

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.

Well, in some ways we're not successful at all. We're destroying our home. That's not a bit successful.

There are good mothers and bad ones, but most of them are somewhere in-between.