I miss the early days; I do. I was so lucky. I basically had it to myself, learning about these chimpanzees. Nobody knew anything about them. Discovering their different personalities, different life histories. I was lucky.

I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in ’86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.

Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.

Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do – like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language – sign language – and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.

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

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.

The part that always shocked me was the inter-community violence among the chimps: the patrols and the vicious attacks on strangers that lead to death. It’s an unfortunate parallel to human behavior – they have a dark side just as we do. We have less excuse, because we can deliberate, so I believe only we are capable of true calculated evil.

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 got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 quantity and quality of consciousness, one may say, have always been growing throughout geological times. In this respect man, in whom nervous organisation and therefore psychological powers have attained an undisputed maximum, may be considered, scientifically, as a natural centre of evolution of the primates.

I bear a charmed life.

I’m one of the luckiest people on earth.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‚tap-dancing to work.‘

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

I am a lucky man. I have had a dream and it has come true, and that is not a thing that happens often to men.

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.

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.

I don’t have any stress. I’m very lucky. I live a very healthy life.

I feel lucky that I can have people laugh solidly for a whole hour by just saying what I think and getting paid for it.