“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
“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
“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 have the choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place–or not to bother”
― 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
“The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.”
― 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
“Michael Pollan likens consumer choices to pulling single threads out of a garment. We pull a thread from the garment when we refuse to purchase eggs or meat from birds who were raised in confinement, whose beaks were clipped so they could never once taste their natural diet of worms and insects. We pull out a thread when we refuse to bring home a hormone-fattened turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. We pull a thread when we refuse to buy meat or dairy products from cows who were never allowed to chew grass, or breathe fresh air, or feel the warm sun on their backs.
The more threads we pull, the more difficult it is for the industry to stay intact. You demand eggs and meat without hormones, and the industry will have to figure out how it can raise farm animals without them. Let the animals graze outside and it slows production. Eventually the whole thing will have to unravel.
If the factory farm does indeed unravel – and it must – then there is hope that we can, gradually, reverse the environmental damage it has caused. Once the animal feed operations have gone and livestock are once again able to graze, there will be a massive reduction in the agricultural chemicals currently used to grow grain for animals. And eventually, the horrendous contamination caused by animal waste can be cleaned up. None of this will be easy.
The hardest part of returning to a truly healthy environment may be changing the current totally unsustainable heavy-meat-eating culture of increasing numbers of people around the world. But we must try. We must make a start, one by one.”
― Jane Goodall
“We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism, and love.”
― Jane Goodall
“Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.”
― 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
“One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.”
― Jane Goodall
“Farm animals are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they are individual beings in their own right. As such, they deserve our respect. And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent? Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been treated so with little respect and kindness just to make more meat.”
― 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
“And if we dare to look into those eyes, then we shall feel their suffering in our hearts. More and more people have seen that appeal and felt it in their hearts. All around the world there is an awakening of understanding and compassion, and understanding that reaches out to help the suffering animals in their vanishing homelands. That embraces hungry, sick, and desperate human beings, people who are starving while the fortunate among us have so much more than we need. And if, one by one, we help them, the hurting animals, the desperate humans, then together we shall alleviate so much of the hunger, fear, and pain in the world. Together we can bring change to the world, gradually replacing fear and hatred with compassion and love. Love for all living beings.”
― 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
“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
“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 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
“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
“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
“I became totally absorbed into this forest existence. It was an unparalleled period when aloneness was a way of life; a perfect opportunity, it might seem, for meditating on the meaning of existence and my role in it all. But I was far too busy learning about the chimpanzees’lives to worry about the meaning of my own. I had gone to Gombe to accomplish a specific goal, not to pursue my early preoccupation with philosophy and religion. Nevertheless, those months at Gombe helped to shape the person I am today-I would have been insensitive indeed if the wonder and the endless fascination of my new world had not had a major impact on my thinking. All the time I was getting closer to animals and nature, and as a result, closer to myself and more and more in tune with the spiritual power that I felt all around. 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 even describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected. The beauty was always there, but moments of true awareness were rare. They would come, unannounced; perhaps when I was watching the pale flush preceding dawn; or looking up through the rustling leaves of some giant forest tree into the greens and browns and the black shadows and the occasionally ensured bright fleck of blue sky; or when I stood, as darkness fell, with one hand on the still warm trunk of a tree and looked at the sparkling of an early moon on the never still, softly sighing water of Lake Tanganyika.”
― Jane Goodall
“We have a responsibility toward the other life-forms of our planet whose continued existence is threatened by the thoughtless behavior of our own human species. . . . Environmental responsibility – for if there is no God, then, obviously, it is up to us to put things right.”
― 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
“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.”
― Jane Goodall
“….I understood why those who had lived through war or economic disasters, and who had built for themselves a good life and a high standard of living, were rightly proud to be able to provide for their children those things which they themselves had not had. And why their children, inevitably, took those things for granted. It meant that new values and new expectations had crept into our societies along with new standards of living. Hence the materialistic and often greedy and selfish lifestyle of so many young people in the Western world, especially in the United States.”
― Jane Goodall
“…it honestly didn’t matter how we humans got to be the way we are, whether evolution or special creation was responsible. What mattered and mattered desperately was our future development. Were we going to go on destroying God’s creation, fighting each other, hurting the other creatures of the His planet?”
― jane goodall
“We find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think was “just human”.”
― Jane Goodall
“And I thought how sad it was that, for all our sophisticated intellect, for all our noble aspirations, our aggressive behavior was not just similar in many ways to that of the chimpanzees – it was even worse. Worse because human beings have the potential to rise above their baser instincts, whereas chimpanzees probably do not.”
― 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
“Oh, the world needs those standing on the Bridge, For they know how Eternity reaches to earth In the wind that brings music to the leaves Of the forest: in the drops of rain that caress The sleeping life of the desert: in the sunbeams Of the first spring day in an alpine meadow. Only they can blow the dust from the seeing eyes Of those who are blind.”
― Jane Goodall
“People said, “Jane, forget about this nonsense with Africa. Dream about things you can achieve.”
― Jane Goodall
“Most of us don’t realize the difference we could make. We love to shrug off our own responsibilities, to point fingers at others. “Surely,” we say, “the pollution, waste, and other ills are not our fault. They are the fault of the industry, business, science. They are the fault of the politicians,” This leads to a destructive and potentially deadly apathy.”
― 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
“Only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony can we achieve our true potential.”
― Jane Goodall
“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
“There is a powerful force unleashed when young people resolve to make a change.”
― 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, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey
“It actually doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.” Jane Goodall”
― Jane Goodall
“THE OLD WISDOM
When the night wind makes the pine trees creak
And the pale clouds glide across the dark sky,
Go out my child, go out and seek
Your soul: The Eternal I.
For all the grasses rustling at your feet
And every flaming star that glitters high
Above you, close up and meet
In you: The Eternal I.
Yes, my child, go out into the world; walk slow
And silent, comprehending all, and by and by
Your soul, the Universe, will know
Itself: the Eternal I.”
― Jane Goodall
“I don’t remember when first I heard Them calling, with their silvery voices, The little Angels of the trees and flowers. They offered to unlock my mind And take my soul away, to clean. And oh! I welcomed them, and lay Stretched out upon the fragrant Grass, light as an empty husk. Then they, with rueful smiles, did oil The rusty hinges of my mind, and swept Away the cobwebs, and hung my soul Upon a topmost bough, to air, Close to the purifying sun. And I was lucky For as it fluttered there, a robin chat’s sweet Song rose through the trees till every fiber Of my soul was bathed in harmony. When all was clean and new they fetched My soul and slipped it back and, smiling, Danced away. And I—well, for a day or two— I looked upon the world with all the Innocence and wonder of a newborn babe. And now, if I am sad, or filled With sudden rage, I find some quiet place With grass and leaves and earth, and sit there Silently, and hope that they will come And call me, with their silvery voices, And make me clean again, those Little Angels of the trees and flowers.”
― Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey
“Without patience I could never have succeeded.”
― Jane Goodall
“There are really only two ways, it seems to me, in which we can think about our existence here on earth. We either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a “tale told by an idiot,” a purposeless emergence of life-forms including the clever, greedy, selfish, and unfortunately destructive species that we call Homo sapiens—the “evolutionary goof.” Or we believe that, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.” In other words, a plan, a purpose to it all.”
― Jane Goodall
“I don’t have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I feel it particularly when I’m out in nature. It’s just something that’s bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it’s enough for me.”
― Jane Goodall
“Some people say… that violence and war are inevitable. I say rubbish: Our brains are fully capable of controlling instinctive behavior. We’re not very good at it though, are we?”
― Jane Goodall
“So, let us move forward with faith in ourselves, in our intelligence, in our indomitable spirit. Let us develop respect for all living things. Let us try to replace violence and intolerance with understanding and compassion and love.”
― Jane Goodall
“As thy days, so shall thy strength be.”
― Jane Goodall
“How healing it was to be back at Gombe again, and by myself with the chimpanzees and their forest. I had left the busy, materialistic world so full of greed and selfishness and, for a little while, could feel myself, as in the early days, a part of nature. I felt very much in tune with the chimpanzees, for I was spending time with them not to observe, but simple because I needed their company, undemanding and free of pity.”
― 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, as “pets,” for food, in research laboratories, or any of the other uses to which we subject them.”
― Jane Goodall