Top 160 Jane Goodall Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “If I were a bird that needs feathers to fly higher, my mother would be my strongest feather. She was extremely supportive. When I was one and a half, I took a whole handful of earthworms to bed with me. My mother said very quietly, “Jane, they will die if they leave the earth.” And so, together, we put them back into the garden.”

— Jane Goodall

102. “Women tend to be more intuitive, or to admit to being intuitive, and maybe the hard science approach isn’t so attractive. The way that science is taught is very cold. I would never have become a scientist if I had been taught like that.”

— Jane Goodall

103. “The chimpanzees taught me a lot about nonverbal communication. The big difference between them and us is that they don’t have spoken language. Everything else is almost the same: Kissing, embracing, swaggering, shaking the fist.”

— Jane Goodall

104. “That’s what keeps me going. Everywhere I go there are young people with shining eyes wanting to tell me, “Dr. Jane, we’re going to make the world a better place.””

— Jane Goodall

105. “However much you know giraffes, to see one in the wild for the first time feels prehistoric.”

— Jane Goodall

106. “Some people say, therefore, that violence and war are inevitable. I say rubbish: Our brains are fully capable of controlling instinctive behavior.”

— Jane Goodall

107. “Chimpanzees have given me so much. The long hours spent with them in the forest have enriched my life beyond measure. What I have learned from them has shaped my understanding of human behavior, of our place in nature.”

— Jane Goodall

108. “Animals were my passion from even before I could speak apparently. When I was about 10, 11 I fell in love with Tarzan.”

— Jane Goodall

109. “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

110. “If we do not do something to help these creatures, we make a mockery of the whole concept of justice.”

— Jane Goodall

111. “You may not believe in evolution, and that is all right. How we humans came to be the way we are is far less important than how we should act now to get out of the mess we have made for ourselves.”

— Jane Goodall

112. “As a child, we couldn’t afford holidays overseas, so instead I travelled through books. I was inspired by Dr Dolittle and Tarzan.”

— Jane Goodall

113. “As human beings, we can encompass a vague feeling of what the universe is, and all in this funny little brain here – so there has to be something more than just brain, it has to be something to do with spirit as well.”

— Jane Goodall

114. “I well remember writing to Louis about my first observations, describing how David Graybeard not only used bits of straw to fish for termites but actually stripped leaves from a stem and thus made a tool. And I remember too receiving the now oft-quoted telegram he sent in response to my letter: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.” There.”

— Jane Goodall

115. “Terrorism is usually fueled by poverty, and the fanatical faith of the terrorists who truly believe that the more people they kill who do not subscribe to their faith, the greater their reward in heaven.”

— Jane Goodall

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

— Jane Goodall

117. “If plants could be credited with reasoning powers, we would marvel at the imaginative ways they bribe or ensnare other creatures to carry out their wishes.”

— Jane Goodall

118. “I shouldn’t have named the chimps. It wasn’t scientific. I didn’t know. I knew nothing. And worse sin of all was that I was ascribing to them emotions like happiness, sadness and so forth.”

— Jane Goodall

119. “There are many animal-welfare groups that sometimes seem to forget that human beings are animals too, that we need to include them in our sphere of compassion.”

— Jane Goodall

120. “I’ve learned that if you want people to join in any kind of conservation effort, you have to help them to care with their hearts, not just their heads.”

— Jane Goodall

121. “Mainly because as women’s education increases all around the planet, we find that family size tends to drop.”

— Jane Goodall

122. “Grub and Derek sitting on the veranda of the house in Dar es Salaam. Derek was a nationalized Tanzanian. He knew Swahili as well as he knew English. And he was liked and respected by almost all Tanzanians, including the Kigoma officials and my own field staff. He helped me to build up a new research center, where almost all the observations were made by the Tanzanian field staff. The.”

— Jane Goodall

123. “I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker – yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.”

— Jane Goodall

124. “Every single day, we could be in a motorcar accident, so, we have to carry on with our lives, and not imagine terror around every corner.”

— Jane Goodall

125. “I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.”

— Jane Goodall

126. “I didn’t want to become a professor or get tenure or teach or anything. All I wanted to do was get a degree because Louis Leakey said I needed one, which was right, and once I succeeded I could get back to the field.”

— Jane Goodall

127. “Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive.”

— Jane Goodall

128. “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

129. “Terrorism is fueled by hate. The tragedy is that there are countless young children who are being taught to hate. Terrorism is usually fueled also by poverty.”

— Jane Goodall

130. “I always loved animals. And when I was ten, I decided I had to go to Africa and live with animals and write books about them.”

— Jane Goodall

131. “It was both fascinating and appalling to learn that chimpanzees were capable of hostile and territorial behavior that was not unlike certain forms of primitive human warfare.”

— Jane Goodall

132. “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

133. “If you look through all the different cultures. Right from the earliest, earliest days with the animistic religions, we have sought to have some kind of explanation for our life, for our being, that is outside of our humanity.”

— Jane Goodall

134. “I would never say I was an icon, but so many people have said I am, so I suppose I am. I mean, I can’t not be what everyone says I am. But I don’t feel like an icon.”

— Jane Goodall

135. “It’s not Africa that is destroying the African rainforest, it’s selling concessions to timber companies that are not African, they are from the developed world – Japan, America, Germany, Britain.”

— Jane Goodall

136. “We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking – all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.”

— Jane Goodall

137. “But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.”

— Jane Goodall

138. “Consider the farmer who sprays his fields with insecticide to kill the bugs that are damaging his crops. He kills thousands of harmless insects as well, including some that actually do good, such as bees that pollinate the flowers and give us honey. Creatures that feed on insects, especially birds, also get sick and die. In the end, because the poisonous chemicals get widely distributed, humans may become sick, too.”

— Jane Goodall

139. “I was even accused of teaching the chimps how to fish for termites which I mean that would have been such a brilliant coup.”

— Jane Goodall

140. “I think anything is better than war. The extent to which one can negotiate with fanatics, I have no idea. I don’t know.”

— Jane Goodall

141. “When I began in 1960, individuality wasn’t an accepted thing to look for; it was about species-specific behaviour. But animal behaviour is not hard science. There’s room for intuition.”

— Jane Goodall

142. “War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.”

— Jane Goodall

143. “I cannot remember a time when I did not want to go to Africa to study animals.”

— Jane Goodall

144. “One cannot watch chimpanzee infants for long without realizing that they have the same emotional need for affection and reassurance as human children.”

— Jane Goodall

145. “I think we’re still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.”

— Jane Goodall

146. “When I was young, I knew that, somehow, I would go to Africa and live with animals. And I wanted to write books about them. I don’t think I spent too much time wondering exactly how I would do it. I just felt sure that the right opportunity would somehow come. I didn’t feel frustrated because I could not go a really long trip while Rusty was still alive. It would have seemed like a betrayal. And while I waited I went on learning.”

— Jane Goodall

147. “I had a wonderful teacher about animal behavior.”

— Jane Goodall

148. “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

149. “Here was a chimpanzee using a tool... That was object modification – the crude beginning of tool making.”

— Jane Goodall

150. “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