Quotes About Chimps

#1. What chimps don't seem capable of understanding is the state of false belief. They don't have a theory of mind that accounts for actions driven by beliefs in conflict with reality. And really, who lacking that will ever be able to navigate the human world?

Karen Joy Fowler

#2. Learning from wolves to interact with pet dogs makes about as much sense as, 'I want to improve my parenting - let's see how the chimps do it!'

Ian Dunbar

#3. We share a common ancestor with chimps that is not shared by mandrills, we share a common ancestor with mandrills that is not shared by bushbabies, and on and on and on, to the ancestor we share with nematode worms that is not shared with oak trees.

Simon Barnes

#4. 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

#5. You have to think if we've been visited by extraterrestrial life, it was like a zookeeper walking into the chimp enclosure: He looks around, takes some pictures, then leaves without interacting significantly with the environment. Meanwhile the chimps have no idea what the fuck just happened.

J. Richard Singleton

#6. 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.

Jane Goodall

#7. She gave me the jabs and said I was covered for every worst-case scenario, including being bitten by a dirty chimp. I told her this is why we have over-population problems. Why are idiots who annoy dirty chimps being protected?

Karl Pilkington

#8. Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

Alison Gopnik

#9. Studying chimps, I came to the conclusion that being evil is something that only humans are capable of. A chimp would never plan to pull another's nails out. The chimps' way of aggression is quick and brutal. I compare them to gang attacks.

Jane Goodall

#10. Humans. Sometimes they make chimps look smart.

Katherine Applegate

#11. I was even accused of teaching the chimps how to fish for termites which I mean that would have been such a brilliant coup.

Jane Goodall

#12. People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We're all in this together.

David Quammen

#13. 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.

Jane Goodall

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. A chimpanzee is not the same category as a capuchin - chimps are half-human. I need a chimp and his name is going to be Bertie.

Jonathan Dunne

#17. To the question of whether sharing 96% of our genetic make-up with chimps makes us 96 percent chimp; we also share about 50% of our DNA with bananas - that does not make us half bananas!

Steve Jones

#18. When chimps threaten, they open their mouth and show their teeth. It's a little like waving a knife in front of you. It's very primitive, and therefore bizarre.

Helen Fisher

#19. If the Japanese want to be taken seriously as world financial powers, they'd better quit using the same tailor as variety show chimps.

P. J. O'Rourke

#20. [Director] Peter Wallerstein does great work rescuing sea life along the shores of LA, and I helped raise money for sanctuaries such as Chimp Haven, who are now taking in over two hundred medical lab chimps released from government-funded medical testing labs.

Alison Eastwood

#21. 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.

Jane Goodall

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

Jane Goodall

#23. One of the things we found out as we filmed with people who dealt with chimps, and with all animals, and it's really incredible, is their levels of intelligence that we don't recognize right away.

D. A. Pennebaker

#24. I never minded flying cheap. I always said to myself, 'Taking this flight saves enough money to rescue four dogs, or six cats, or will let me make a difference to the one woman saving chimps in Cameroon.'

Elayne Boosler

#25. Even chimps understand the concept - if a troop of chimps enters a fruit tree, they will only pick the fruits that are ripe and leave the others growing. That is sustainability.

Jane Goodall

#26. Because men, compared to male chimps, have such relatively small testicles (large testicles indicate a species where many males mate, one after the other, with the same female), we might guess that promiscuous societies were uncommon in the immediate human past.

Carl Sagan

#27. The chimps love holidays - in fact Tatu actually anticipates them and asks about them.

Roger Fouts

#28. Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#29. [I don't get it. You guys look down on chimps for flinging their own poo but you think it's fine to fling other kinds of poo around? I mean, you get opposable thumbs and this is what you do with them?]

Kevin Hearne

#30. If one compares the sequence of amino acids that go to form the protein haemoglobin, it becomes apparent that humans and chimps are identical and do not differ in a single site ...

Simon Conway Morris

#31. Both bonobos and common chimps are as close to humans as foxes are to dogs. I don't know about you, but that's closer than I feel to some of my human relatives.

Susan Block

#32. Chimps cannot tell us anything about peaceful relations, because chimps have only different degrees of hostility between communities. Whereas bonobos do tell us something; they tell us about the possibility of having peaceful relationships.

Frans De Waal

#33. Chimps taught us we're not separated from the animal kingdom, we're a part of it.

Jane Goodall

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

Jonathan Dunne

#35. 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.

Jane Goodall

#36. You don't know whether chimps are going to kill you or kiss you. They're very open on some levels and much more evil in a certain way.

Tim Burton

#37. Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than
bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.

Frans De Waal

#38. Moreover, not unlike presidential candidates who hold babies up in the air as soon as the cameras are rolling, male chimps vying for power develop a sudden interest in infants, which they hold and tickle in order

Frans De Waal

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

Jane Goodall

#40. Humans speak too much. They chatter like chimps, crowding the world with their noise even when they have nothing to say.

Katherine Applegate

#41. We're individuals bound by a pattern of reciprocal obligation," I said. "If a group of chimps in the Amazon can be called a family, I think the Varners qualify."
-Ella

Lisa Kleypas

#42. Girls clamored for Caleb's attention like chimps on crack. He's got the banana that every girl wants,

Tarryn Fisher

#43. When I see David Attenborough talking about how chimps live, big apes, I just remember my dad and the way he'd look at you. He couldn't speak, but everything else about him was, 'This is us, a family.' Relationships are just as intense as they are for people who can speak. Probably more so.

Richard Griffiths

#44. Empathy is also a natural human behavior, and natural to chimps as well. When we see someone hurt, our brains respond to some extent as if we'd been hurt ourselves.

Karen Joy Fowler

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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.

Jane Goodall

#48. 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.

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. 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