Jane Goodall — "The great thing about chimpanzees is that they teach you humility."
The great thing about chimpanzees is that they teach you humility.
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More from Jane Goodall
"We need to listen to the voices of the young people. They are the ones who will inherit the Earth."
"The root of our problems is that we have become disconnected from the natural world."
"We are not the only intelligent beings on this planet."
"We have to realize that we are part of nature, and not separate from it."
"The greatest danger to our future is apathy."
About Jane Goodall (born 1934)
British primatologist who in 1960 began the longest-running wild primate study at Gombe Stream, transforming our understanding of chimpanzees. Closely associated with Dian Fossey (mountain-gorilla researcher) and Birutė Galdikas (orangutan researcher; together with Goodall and Fossey one of Louis Leakey's 'Trimates'). For an intellectual contrast, see Walter Palmer, American dentist who killed Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe in 2015 — Palmer represents the trophy-hunting tradition Goodall's life's work has been organized against — the colonial-era hunter-naturalist worldview that treated primates and big game as specimens or trophies, which Goodall's Roots & Shoots and Jane Goodall Institute exist specifically to displace.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Chimpanzees are close enough to humans in behavior, emotion, and intelligence that spending time with them dismantles any illusion of human superiority. Watching them form bonds, solve problems, grieve, and communicate forces you to reconsider what makes us special. The quote argues that genuine understanding of nature requires abandoning arrogance — recognizing we share the planet with creatures whose complexity and depth rival our own.
Relevance to Jane Goodall
Goodall arrived at Gombe in 1960 with no formal science degree, guided by curiosity and Louis Leakey's mentorship. Her landmark discovery that chimps fashion and use tools — shocking the scientific world — came from patient, humble observation rather than hypothesis-driven experimentation. She named her subjects rather than numbering them and documented their individual personalities, empathy, and even warfare, embodying the very humility she describes as the chimps' greatest lesson.
The era
When Goodall began her Gombe research in 1960, Cold War-era science celebrated human mastery over nature — nuclear power, space conquest, and technological dominance framed Western identity. The idea that an ape could use tools, feel grief, or wage war overturned centuries of human exceptionalism. The nascent environmental movement of the 1960s and '70s was beginning to challenge that dominance narrative, and Goodall's findings gave it powerful biological grounding.
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