QuoteProject
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
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote reflects on the close evolutionary relationship between humans and chimpanzees, emphasizing the blurred boundaries between species.

Jane Goodall's quote highlights the significant contributions of chimpanzees to our understanding of human evolution and the interconnectedness of all living beings. It suggests that as we study these animals, we become increasingly aware that humans are not distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom, but rather part of a continuum of life where distinctions become less clear over time.

Themes

ChimpanzeesEvolutionAnimalsNatureHumanityInterconnectedness

In practice

Example use cases

During a lecture on evolution, one might quote Jane Goodall to illustrate the similarities between humans and other animals.

More from Jane Goodall

The voice of the natural world would be, "Could you please give us space and leave us alone to get along with our own lives and our own ways, because we actually know much better how to do it then when you start interfering."
Jane GoodallRead
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 GoodallRead
I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.
Jane GoodallRead
Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutan shave 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.
Jane GoodallRead
There are an awful lot of scientists today who believe that before very long we shall have unraveled all the secrets of the universe. There will be no puzzles anymore. To me, it'd be really, really tragic because I think one of the most exciting things is this feeling of mystery, feeling of awe, the feeling of looking at a little live thing and being amazed by it and how it has emerged through these hundreds of years of evolution and there it is and it is perfect and why.
Jane GoodallRead
In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes.
Jane GoodallRead

Similar quotes

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
John DeweyRead
We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.
Lewis ThomasRead
We are, in a way, temporary ambulatory repositories for our nucleic acids. This does not deny our humanity; it does not prevent us from pursuing the good, the true and the beautiful. But it would be a great mistake to ignore where we have come from in our attempt to determine where we are going.
Carl SaganRead
The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.
Donald KnuthRead
Medicine is a science which hath been (as we have said) more professed than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced: the labour having been, in my judgment, rather in circle than in progression. For I find much iteration, but small addition. It considereth causes of diseases, with the occasions or impulsions; the diseases themselves, with the accidents; and the cures, with the preservation.
Francis BaconRead
There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.
Nikolai LobachevskyRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.