Jane Morris Goodall is an English anthropologist and primatologist. She is known as an expert on chimpanzees after a 60-year study of them. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute and started the Roots & Shoots program.
She has also served on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project. She was named a UN Messenger of Peace in 2002 and is an honorary member of the World Future Council.
Here are some of her quotes that will inspire you.
Inspiring Jane Goodall Quotes.
“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
“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
“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” – Jane Goodall
“If we kill off the wild, then we are killing a part of our souls.” – 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
“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.” – 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
“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
“Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.” – Jane Goodall
“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you.” – 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
“We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism, and love.” – Jane Goodall
“What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.”
– Jane Goodall
“One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.” – 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
“I think the most important thing is to keep active and to hope that your mind stays active.” – 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
“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
“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.” – Jane Goodall
“If we do not do something to help these creatures, we make a mockery of the whole concept of justice.”
– Jane Goodall
“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.” – Jane Goodall
“People say maybe we have a soul and chimpanzees don’t. I feel that it’s quite possible that if we have souls, chimpanzees have souls as well.” – 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
“Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.” – 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 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
“Lasting change is a series of compromises. And compromise is all right, as long your values don’t change.”
– Jane Goodall
“I don’t think that faith, whatever you’re being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained. And I don’t want to explain this whole life business through truth, science. There’s so much mystery. There’s so much awe.” – Jane Goodall
“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.” – Jane Goodall
“I like some animals more than some people, some people more than some animals.” – 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.” – Jane Goodall
“We find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think was ‘just 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
“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
“There is a powerful force unleashed when young people resolve to make a change.” – 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.” – Jane Goodall
“The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.”
– Jane Goodall
“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
