Jane Goodall Quotes

We find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think was "just human".

The chimpanzee study was - well, it's still going on, and I think it's taught us perhaps more than anything else to be a little humble; that we are, indeed, unique primates, we humans, but we're simply not as different from the rest of the animal kingdom as we used to think.

The proposition that humans have mental characteristics wholly absent in non-humans is inconsistent with the theory of evolution.

There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.

The animal kingdom exhibits a series of mental developments which may be regarded as antecedents to the mental development of man, for the mental life of animals shows itself to be throughout, in its elements and in the general laws governing the combination of the elements, the same as the mental life of man.

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

Man, of all the animals, is probably the only one to regard himself as a great delicacy.

If a cat does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.

It is very funny about money. The thing that differentiates man from animals is money. All animals have the same emotions and the same ways as men. Anybody who has lots of animals around knows that. But the thing no animal can do is count, and the thing no animal can know is money.

MAN IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ANIMAL. Animals, as distinct from man, are not machine-like, not sadistic; their societies, within the same species, are incomparably more peaceful than those of man. The basic question, then is: What has made the animal, man, degenerate into a machine?

I've always felt that animals are the purest spirits in the world. They don't fake or hide their feelings, and they are the most loyal creatures on Earth. And somehow we humans think we're smarter-what a joke.

...the program of scientific experimentation that leads you to conclude that animals are imbeciles is profoundly anthropocentric. It values being able to find your way out of a sterile maze, ignoring the fact that if the researcher who designed the maze were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he or she would be dead of starvation in a week...If I as a human being were told that the standards by which animals are being measured in these experiments are human standards, I would be insulted.

Chimps taught us we're not separated from the animal kingdom, we're a part of it.

Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the monkeys and apes casually knock them down -- toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings on Earth.

Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.

Of all animals, he alone attains to the Contemplative Life.

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.

Biologically, man is still the great amateur of the animal kingdom; he is unique in his lack of anatomical and physiological specialization.

I'm not over-fond of animals. I am merely astounded by them.

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.

I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence... to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself.

I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.

Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.

We should venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.