Jane Goodall Quotes

I was always interested in animals, but when I was little, animal behavior was still a new science. It was available to become a veterinarian, it was available to study biology, but not specifically animal behavior. In the '60s, Jane Goodall was the founder of this new science.

Cats and dogs are a very good window into the natural world: a chance to see how another species lives and deals with its problems, what they like and what they don't like.

There isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. All the time, we find animals doing things that, in our arrogance, we thought were just human.

Early experiences convinced me that animals can and do have quite distinct personalities.

Perhaps measuring animal intelligence by comparing it to human intelligence isn't the best litmus test.

Animals interest me more than anything else.

I never thought I could learn much from a dog or cat. They sleep when we sleep. They eat when we eat. I'm into observing animals being as wild as they can be in a captive environment.

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

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.

I'd been interested in animal behaviour as a teenager and had thought of studying it at one point.

With land-roaming animals, I've just read so much about the sophistication of their emotional lives and their intelligence and the way they process information that betrays a greater intelligence.

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

When I'd written my 'Silverwing' series - I'd imbued the bats with full human awareness and vocabulary.

Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities.

The fact that the apes exist and that we can study them is extremely important and makes us reflect on ourselves and our human nature. In that sense alone, you need to protect the apes.

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment.

Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.

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

I'm in the role of helping these apes negotiate the human role. I'm just a temporary intermediary in what I think will be eventual communication between the two species.

What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it.

I miss the early days; I do. I was so lucky. I basically had it to myself, learning about these chimpanzees. Nobody knew anything about them. Discovering their different personalities, different life histories. I was lucky.

I've always had a fascination for animals. I loved watching them, and even then I thought of them as beings rather than pets. I call it a birth affect!

I learned from my dog long before I went to Gombe that we weren't the only beings with personalities. What the chimps did was help me to persuade others.

If dogs could talk, perhaps we would find it as hard to get along with them as we do with people.

I have come to know Bugs so well that I no longer have to think about what he is doing in any situation.