“Without patience I could never have succeeded.”

Cruelty is a terrible thing. I believe it is the worst human sin.

I love dogs, not chimps. Some chimps are nice, and some are horrid. I don’t actually think of them as animals any more than I think of us as animals, although both of us are.

Someday we shall look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons?

Very few Westerners, I thought, could tolerate such a way of life- for it would mean having to forgo the luxuries which we had come to think of as necessities.

And always I have this feeling-which may not be true at all-that I am being used as a messenger.

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

Only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony can we achieve our true potential.

A sense of calm came over me. More and more often I found myself thinking, This is where I belong. This is what I came into this world to do.

I like to envision the whole world as a jigsaw puzzle. If you look at the whole picture, it is overwhelming and terrifying, but if you work on your little part of the jigsaw and know that people all over the world are working on their little bits, that’s what will give you hope.

I think the best evenings are when we have messages, things that make us think, but we can also laugh and enjoy each other’s company.

Trees are living beings. And they have their own personalities. There are the young, eager saplings, all striving with each other. If you put your cheek against one of those, you almost sense the sap rising and the energy.

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

From the moment when, staring into the eyes of a chimpanzee, I saw a thinking, reasoning personality looking back.

Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other.

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.

I like some animals more than some people, some people more than some animals.