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.

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 don't care two hoots about civilization. I want to wander in the wild.

Here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that's ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain ... and yet we're destroying the only home we have.

If you work hard and be persistent, you will achieve whatever you want to do.

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.

Even when it comes to things like wars over oil, which may seem like a whole different ball game, there are still comparisons one can draw: chimps fight for their territory; they fight for the resources within that territory, so it does relate in a way.

It made me feel particularly sickened to know that this kind of callous attitude toward animals is repeated again and again in laboratories around this country.

A good mother is protective but not over-protective. She's patient, she's affectionate, she's playful, but above all she is supportive.

It honestly didn't matter how we humans got to be the way we are, whether evolution or special creation was responsible. What mattered and mattered desperately was our future development. Were we going to go on destroying God's creation, fighting each other, hurting the other creatures of the His planet?

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

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.

Chimps are brutal, and it is so deliberate. The males go out and get near the boundary of their territory. And they walk very silently trying hard not to make any noise. They will climb into a tree and stare out over hostile territory for hours. They are waiting for the right opportunity. And then they attack.

I believe sharing stories and experiences is the best way to teach people to empathize!

The hardest part of returning to a truly healthy environment may be changing the current totally unsustainable heavy-meat-eating culture of increasing numbers of people around the world. But we must try. We must make a start, one by one.

Chimpanzees are incredibly intelligent. They can learn more than 400 signs of American Sign Language. They have memories for spatial distribution, like numbers on a TV screen, way better than ours. You come onto the emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and despair -- all the things for which I was accused of being anthropomorphic when I ascribed them to chimpanzees.

Primates are very territorial. It is in their nature to protect their food resources as well as their females and young.

My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn't have any money, because Africa was the 'dark continent', and because I was a girl.

What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

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.