Primates Quotes - Page 2

• Contrary to general belief, humans imitate apes more than the reverse. The sight of monkeys or apes induces an irresistible urge in people to jump up and down, exaggeratedly scratch themselves and holler in a way that must make the primates wonder how this otherwise so intelligent species has come to depend on such inferior means of communication.

  Frans de Waal

  Communication, Mean, Intelligent

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• I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others.

  Lewis Thomas

  Knowledge, Science, Talking

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• Our most serious obstacle is the uncontrollable urge to convert everything to the familiar, to reduce it all to the level of the primate brain; to reject the living, breathing reality of the totality of all possible attention.

  E. J. Gold

  Reality, Uncontrollable Urge, Breathing

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• As this VP discovered, being a boss is much like being a high-status primate in any group: the creatures beneath you in the pecking order watch every move you make – and so they know a lot more about you than you know about them.

  Bob Sutton

  Moving, Order, Boss

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• What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Smoking, Soul, Flesh

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Suttree”, p.156, Pan Macmillan

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• God was created by evolution, inside the imagination of a primate.

  Steve Fowler

  God, Honesty, Editors

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• The only option is politeness-remember always that you are dealing with other primates.

  Paul Ford

  Remember, Politeness

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• I think we give human beings too much credit. We're primates, you know.

  Eric Andre

  Thinking, Giving, Credit

  Source: www.complex.com

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• I think there's some evidence that we're empathic by nature. There is some evidence from studies of babies and young children that they resonate with the pain of others, and there's some work by Frans de Waal that other primates also resonate with the pain of others.

  Paul Bloom

  Baby, Children, Pain

  "Paul Bloom: The Trouble With Empathy". Interview with Allyson Kirkpatrick, www.guernicamag.com. February 1, 2016.

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• I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures.

  Christiaan Barnard

  Heart, Sleep, Animal

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• It's not that humans and non-humans are identical... but the lack of understanding that led to the slave trade is the same lack of understanding many people have about animals today. When slaves were brought over from Africa, many people believed they were not humans, that they didn't have feelings. Many people believe that primates and other animals don't have feelings, too, but they do.

  Jane Goodall

  Believe, Animal, People

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• I'm always keen to use my body in my work, so I'm looking forward to the motion capture for Smaug. Both Gollum and King Kong were primates, whereas I'm playing a serpent, so it'll be interesting - I'll have to tie my legs together, possibly, or else they'll be kind of splayed out to the side as a reptile's should be.

  Benedict Cumberbatch

  Kings, Ties, Interesting

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• As our closest relatives, they (chimpanzees) tell us special things about what it means to be a primate and, ultimately, what it means to be a human at the DNA level.

  Francis Collins

  Mean, Dna, Special

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• It's the bond between mother and child, which is really for us and for chimps and other primates, the root of all the expressions of social behavior.

  Jane Goodall

  Mother, Children, Expression

  "Bill Moyers Journal", www.pbs.org. November 27, 2009.

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• We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.

  Fred Hoyle

  Differences, Long, Today

  "Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe". Book by Chandra Wickramasinghe and Fred Hoyle (p. 15), 1978.

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• The Jackdaw sat in the Cardinal's chair! Bishop and Abbot and Prior were there, Many a monk and many a friar, Many a knight and many a squire, With a great many more of lesser degree,-- In sooth a goodly company; And they served the Lord Primate on bended knee. Never, I ween, Was a prouder seen, Read of in books or dreamt of in dreams, Than the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims.

  Richard Harris Barham

  Dream, Book, Knights

  'The Ingoldsby Legends' (First Series, 1840) 'The Jackdaw of Rheims'

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• Traveling across the United States, it's easy to see why Americans are often thought of as stupid. At the San Diego Zoo, right near the primate habitats, there's a display featuring half a dozen life-size gorillas made out of bronze. Posted nearby is a sign reading CAUTION: GORILLA STATUES MAY BE HOT. Everywhere you turn, the obvious is being stated. CANNON MAY BE LOUD. MOVING SIDEWALK IS ABOUT TO END. To people who don't run around suing one another, such signs suggest a crippling lack of intelligence.

  David Sedaris

  Running, Zoos, Stupid

  David Sedaris (2000). “Me talk pretty one day”

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• The genetic stage of a gene pool can be identified by the personality characteristics of the local God. Jehovah of Genesis is a low-level barbarian macho punk God. He boastfully claims to have created the heaven and the stars and the world, but provides no technical details or replicable blueprints. His preoccupations, whims, anxieties, jealousies, rules and hatred of women are primitive mammalian brain. His petty prides are primate.

  Timothy Leary

  Stars, Pride, Personality

  Timothy Leary (2009). “Evolutionary Agents”, p.41, Ronin Publishing

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• It's the old idea that the process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater complexity--in particular greater intellectual complexity. In one twig of the tree of life, namely ours, having a big brain happened to have advantages. But that's just what worked for a particular species of primate 5 to 7 million years ago.

  Steven Pinker

  Ideas, Years, Tree

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• The townspeople are morons, yokels, peasants and genus homo boobiensis...surrounded by gaping primates from the upland vallies.

  H. L. Mencken

  Modern Life, Peasants, Moron

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• If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.

  Terence McKenna

  Civilization, Names, Imagination

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• To neglect the common ground with other primates, and to deny the evolutionary roots of human morality, would be like arriving at the top of a tower to declare that the rest of the building is irrelevant, that the precious concept of "tower" ought to be reserved for the summit.

  Frans de Waal

  Roots, Arriving, Would Be

  Frans de Waal (2009). “Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved”, p.181, Princeton University Press

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• Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Animal, Brain, Groups

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• We are by far the most contradictory of all primates. An animal with this much internal conflict has never lived on this earth.

  Frans de Waal

  Animal, Earth, Conflict

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• In humans, the family prevents infanticide. Next to language, the core family, consisting of a mother, a father and children, is the greatest difference between us and other primates.

  Frans de Waal

  Mother, Children, Father

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