Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn't what I had imagined at all. "

" I am not deeply involved in Australian politics but I know there are prime ministers, governments around the world who are not acting responsibly in relation to climate change. "

" Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest, living fantastic lives, never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. I would say that they have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In Tanzania, the chimps are isolated in a very tiny patch of forest. I flew over it 13 years ago and realized that, basically, all the trees had gone, that people all around the park are struggling to survive. It became very clear that there was no way to protect the chimps while the people were in this dire circumstance. "

" I think the most important thing is to keep active and to hope that your mind stays active. "

" 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. "

" When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I'd caused the dragonfly to be killed. "

" What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language. "

" The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky. "

" I'm highly political. I spend an awful lot of time in the U.S. trying to influence decision-makers. But I don't feel in tune with British politics. "

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

" Chimps are very quick to have a sudden fight or aggressive episode, but they're equally as good at reconciliation. "

" I've watched a lot of people who became famous who completely change and I think it's because they tend to believe all the hype that's out there. I don't think there's that much hype about me. "

" On the day-long follows that I used to do with mothers and their offspring - these chimp families that I knew so well - there was hardly a day when I didn't learn something new about them. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My mother always taught us that if people don't agree with you, the important thing is to listen to them. But if you've listened to them carefully and you still think that you're right, then you must have the courage of your convictions. "

" 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. "

" You cannot share your life with a dog, as I had done in Bournemouth, or a cat, and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings. "

" It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated. "

" As I'm traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we've harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don't know what I feel; I just don't know what the emotion is. "

" Whatever we believe about how we got to be the extraordinary creatures we are today is far less important than bringing our intellect to bear on how do we get together now around the world and get out of the mess that we've made. That's the key thing now. Never mind how we got to be who we are. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I was 10 years old, I loved - I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan. "

" 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. "

" 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. "