Quotes About Chimpanzees

#1. The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for themselves.

Jane Goodall

#2. Number of chimpanzees in the wild has dropped to perhaps half of what it was fifty years ago,

Elizabeth Kolbert

#3. Wild groups of chimpanzees attack their enemies like gangs. What they completely lack, precisely because of their strong territorial behavior, is a friendly relationship with their neighbors.

Frans De Waal

#4. I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders waht is really going on.
We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans.

Kurt Vonnegut

#5. Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.

Clay Shirky

#6. Chimpanzees will eat a little bit of meat. But, they never eat dairy products, and no other animal would do that.

Neal Barnard

#7. When we look at chimpanzees ... we get this extremely fine-grained view of evolution, and as a result we understand a lot more about the processes that are changing our own genome over time.

Bob Waterston

#8. I'm always pushing for human responsibility. Given that chimpanzees and many other animals are sentient and sapient, then we should treat them with respect.

Jane Goodall

#9. Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

Russell Banks

#10. One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.

Jane Goodall

#11. Bonobos, related to chimpanzees and native to the Congo, have been found to engage in French kissing.

Karen Shanor

#12. No distinction in kind rather than degree between ourselves and the chimps? No distinction? Seriously, folks? Here is a simple operational test: the chimpanzees invariably are the one behind the bars of their cages.

David Berlinski

#13. Basically we are chimpanzees with about two percent more intelligence and a little less hair.

Ted Turner

#14. Chimpanzees have given me so much. The long hours spent with them in the forest have enriched my life beyond measure. What I have learned from them has shaped my understanding of human behavior, of our place in nature.

Jane Goodall

#15. Most men probably wouldn't want to live the lives of bonobos. They're constantly clinging to their mothers' apron strings. They lack the ability to make decisions about their own fates, something that we and male chimpanzees practically consider our birthright.

Frans De Waal

#16. 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.

Jane Goodall

#17. There are beautiful examples of art done by chimpanzees in human care.

Frans De Waal

#18. 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.

Jane Goodall

#19. Since the bigger gorillas leave chimps only a fraction of the quantity of food bonobos get, each chimp must fight ferociously to survive, including killing other chimpanzees

Eliot Schrefer

#20. Homo sapiens, which as far as I can tell is only another way of saying weaponised chimpanzees who are hellbent on tearing their cage apart without realising it's not a cage, it's their fucking life support they're shredding.

Paul Russell

#21. Male chimpanzees have an extraordinarily strong drive for dominance. They're constantly jockeying for position.

Frans De Waal

#22. This book [...] demonstrates something we had already suspected on the grounds of the close connection between apes and man: that the social organization of chimpanzees is almost too human to be true.

Frans De Waal

#23. My impression is that a sense of rhythm, which has no analog in language, is unique and that its correlation with movement is unique to human beings. Why else would children start to dance when they're two or three? Chimpanzees don't dance.

Oliver Sacks

#24. We see new things all the time. We see new retroviruses out there - which is the category that HIV falls into - and we're very, very concerned because this is the part of the world where HIV jumped from chimpanzees to humans.

Nathan Wolfe

#25. In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees.

Michio Kaku

#26. No wonder circus animals do what they do: They tortured them. And you know the only ones they can't control? It's the chimpanzees. You can't control them. That's why you never see a gorilla in a movie, because the gorilla may decide there'll be no filming.

Paul Mooney

#27. (Reuters) - In the first case of its kind, a New York appeals court rejected on Thursday an animal rights advocate's bid to extend "legal personhood" to chimpanzees, saying the primates are incapable of bearing the responsibilities that come with having legal rights.

Anonymous

#28. I thus concluded, with the same awe of Jane Goodall discovering the chimpanzees' nimble use of tools to extract termites, it really wasn't so much the tragic event itself, but others having knowledge of it that prevented recovery.

Marisha Pessl

#29. We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more-there is no greater relationship. Long before Darwin, a priest lucid in his madness encountered four chimpanzees on a forlorn island in Africa and hit upon a great truth: We are risen apes, not fallen angels.

Yann Martel

#30. 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.

Jane Goodall

#31. Who would you rather live with, a bunch of bonobos feeling good? Or chimpanzees eating each other's babies? Or humans waterboarding each other and destroying the planet?

Francine Prose

#32. In technological development, in production of material goods and creature comforts, we've challenged the very gods, but psychologically, emotionally, we're scarcely more than chimpanzees with bulldozers, baboons with big bombs.

Tom Robbins

#33. The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation. Of

Yuval Noah Harari

#34. What I was most curious about was why Armstrong, a top U.S. Navy test pilot, flying the most advanced aircraft in the world, would want to join the astronaut corps in 1962, which included chimpanzees and monkeys.

Douglas Brinkley

#35. Animals are everywhere. Some are more romantic, like tigers and elephants and chimpanzees, and some are less romantic, like earthworms, but they are just as interesting.

Isabella Rossellini

#36. Chimps don't have language. Humans actively instruct others about how things should be done. Chimpanzees probably pick up cultural traditions by observation.

Frans De Waal

#37. It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.

Michael Tomasello

#38. The grin got bigger. Shadow found himself remembering a PBS show he had seen as a teenager, about chimpanzees. The show claimed that when apes and chimps smile it's only to bare their teeth in a grimace of hate or aggression or terror. When a chimp grins, it's a threat. This grin was one of those.

Neil Gaiman

#39. 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

#40. We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine

#41. 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

#42. 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.

Jane Goodall

#43. human beings are actually more closely related to the two species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, the familiar chimp, and Pan paniscus, the rare, smaller pygmy chimp or bonobo) than those chimpanzees are to the other apes.

Daniel C. Dennett

#44. 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.

Jane Goodall

#45. The chimpanzees in the zoos do it, Some courageous kangaroos do it Let's do it, let's fall in love. I'm sure giraffes on the sly do it, Even eagles as they fly do it, Let's do it, let's fall in love.

Cole Porter

#46. Chimpanzees have very strong preferences and aversions that are completely personality-linked. The people who are unsuccessful in working with chimpanzees are those who take this personally.

Frans De Waal

#47. I met a few chimpanzees on my pilgrimages and I wasn't sure if they were just shrivelled-up villagers or chimps...

Jonathan Dunne

#48. The chimpanzees taught me a lot about nonverbal communication. The big difference between them and us is that they don't have spoken language. Everything else is almost the same: Kissing, embracing, swaggering, shaking the fist.

Jane Goodall

#49. But let us not forget that human love and compassion are equally deeply rooted in our primate heritage, and in this sphere too our sensibilities are of a higher order of magnitude than those of chimpanzees.

Jane Goodall

#50. He couldn't tell the difference between one politician and another. They were all formlessly enthusiastic chimpanzees to him.

Kurt Vonnegut

#51. Through my work with PETA, I have learned a great deal about chimpanzee behavior and the plight of chimpanzees imprisoned in laboratories.

Woody Harrelson

#52. 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.

Jane Goodall

#53. In addition to Ameslan, chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates are being taught a variety of other gestural languages. And it is just this transition from tongue to hand that has permitted humans to regain the ability-lost, according to Josephus, since Eden-to communicate with the animals.

Carl Sagan

#54. Chimpanzees, typically, kiss and embrace after fights. They first make eye contact from a distance to see the mood of the others. Then they approach and kiss and embrace.

Frans De Waal

#55. We are unique. Chimpanzees are unique. Dogs are unique. But we humans are just not as different as we used to think.

Jane Goodall

#56. The buzzing was like the eager purr of a muscle car that had just been started, but left in neutral. That was another of Cody's metaphors for it; I'd said the sensation felt like an unbalanced washing machine filled with a hundred epileptic chimpanzees. Pretty proud of that one.

Brandon Sanderson

#57. If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimp have to be before killing him constitutes murder?

Carl Sagan

#58. We are part of the world creation, and we ourselves create nothing. Our knowledge allows us to make use of all the forces already in existence, our art to interpret emotions already felt. One big war, an epidemic, and we collapse into ignorance and darkness, fit sons of chimpanzees.

Arshile Gorky

#59. The method of learning by trial and error - of learning from our mistakes - seems to be fundamentally the same whether it is practised by lower or by higher animals, by chimpanzees or by men of science.

Karl R. Popper

#60. Attacks by other chimpanzees are the second most frequent cause of death at Gombe, after disease. Through

Jane Goodall

#61. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power.

Kurt Vonnegut

#62. I never wanted to give up. I thought I might have to. Especially at the beginning when chimpanzees had never seen a white person before.They gave one look at me and ran away! They were scared, but eventually I got their trust.

Jane Goodall

#63. Chimpanzees is hatin but I take it all in stride. Put her in a jungle with bananas on the side.

Nicki Minaj

#64. If we start with chimpanzees, they differ from us with the composition of the DNA by only just over one percent. So, as far as genetics go, we're almost identical. The composition of the blood, the immune system, the structure of the brain - almost identical.

Jane Goodall

#65. When you think of intelligence, don't think of a college professor; think of human beings as opposed to chimpanzees. If you don't have human intelligence, you're not even in the game.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#66. (Although Darwin did not have genetics at hand to prove his case, we now know that humans and chimpanzees share 98 percent of their genes; humans and fruit flies share 44 percent of their genes.)

Virginia Morell

#67. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

Yuval Noah Harari

#68. Classically, the ability to invent and execute plans was believed to be limited to only three species: chimpanzees, gorillas, and human beings. Now

Michael Crichton

#69. The loss of body hair is interesting to anthropologists, because it is a feature that distinguishes us from our nearest living relatives, chimpanzees. They have body hair, we don't.

Mark Stoneking

#70. Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.

Jared Diamond

#71. The cognitive abilities of chimpanzees force us, I think, to raise searching questions about the boundaries of the community of beings to which special ethical considerations are due.

Carl Sagan

#72. -Appointments? You can't be serious. With all due respect, they have the cognitive capacity of chimpanzees right now.-

-And if we want to change that, we will start treating them as human beings, not a mob of apes.-

Neal Shusterman

#73. The Drake farmhouse was like the chimpanzee enclosure at the zoo when feeding time was late.
You know, if all the chimpanzees were undead.
And insane.

Alyxandra Harvey

#74. Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.

Richard Dawkins

#75. Humans, bonobos, and chimpanzees comprise a subfamily called Homininae and will be called "hominines," while humans and other extinct members of our direct lineage will be referred to as "hominins" (Table 13.2).

Anonymous

#76. The oldest form of the Choral Dance is the circle. Even the chimpanzees dance in a circle, and people of every continent still do it.

Curt Sachs

#77. I never used to like babies. I'd always thought if a baby were more like a chimpanzee, I'd have one

Candice Bergen

#78. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a chimpanzee kept in solitude is not a real chimpanzee at all.

Wolfgang Kohler

#79. The mass are animal, in pupilage, and near chimpanzee.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#80. I'll give you a theory: Man's closest relative is not the chimpanzee, as the TV people believe, but is, in fact, the dog.

Garth Stein

#81. What might happen if we could somehow reorient ourselves toward our more loving, bonobo side rather than our inner mad chimpanzee?

Susan Block

#82. Some folks seem to have descended from the chimpanzee much later than others.

Kin Hubbard

#83. The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

Terry Pratchett

#84. If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?

Frans De Waal

#85. I don't think I'm a celebrity. A chimpanzee could have done what I did.

Mark David Chapman