Quotes About Primates

#1. Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education.

Muriel Barbery

#2. 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

#3. He was in a tiny metal-and-ceramic box that was exchanging matter for energy to throw a half dozen primates across a vacuum larger than millions of oceans.

Anonymous

#4. The very fact we use the term "cold-blooded" as a synonym for "heartless" should tell you something about the innate bias we primates hold against reptiles. Do not judge other species by your own social norms.

Becky Chambers

#5. Two of the behaviors that set early humans apart were the systematic sharing of food and altruistic group defense. Other primates did very little of either but, increasingly, hominids did, and those behaviors helped set them on an evolutionary path that produced the modern world.

Sebastian Junger

#6. We spent an enormous amount of time as hominids and as primates living as hunter-gatherers. That is the natural way for us to live, and we're suddenly living in this profoundly unnatural way, and we're still in the process of adapting to it and working out how to live with it.

Spencer Wells

#7. Primates will continue to play social games without the least insight into what is killing them.

Keith Henson

#8. I think we were colonized by aliens 250,000 years ago, and they genetically altered our DNA to be primates into homo erectus and humans. I'm very interested in how we evolved so suddenly, which obviously ties in with the alien thing.

Al Jourgensen

#9. There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors.

Frans De Waal

#10. I've never met anyone who had a monkey for a friend before. (Maggie)
I don't know. I think those two guys you were with would qualify as primates, but then, that's an insult to the primate and I don't want Marvin to get pissed at me. He has higher sensibilities, you know? (Wren)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

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

Clay Shirky

#12. I don't have much use for bishops. There's a reason they're called primates.

Mark Schweizer

#13. Everything is improved by the judicious application of primates.

Chris Roberson

#14. Elephants have a theory of mind - they can think into the head of another elephant and infer their knowledge of the world, including errors and omissions of knowledge. That puts them above all but a handful of species - a few primates, some very smart birds and cetaceans.

Alastair Reynolds

#15. Attention is the way social primates measure status. It is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins.

Keith Henson

#16. Primates need good nutrition, to begin with. Not only fruits and plants, but insects as well.

Richard Leakey

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

H.L. Mencken

#18. Standing within a peat bog in Dingle, you can't help wondering what Ireland was like before you and the other primates scrambled up upon its shores. When viewed from space, did it glow like a furry emerald within a sea of blue, the terrestrial equivalent of a massive marine plankton bloom? We

Hope Jahren

#19. We're not testing it on primates. I want a human cohort of 50 ready to test." Chang

A.G. Riddle

#20. Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. 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 gawky wormbent tabernacle.

Cormac McCarthy

#21. Primate books are good for us. They remind us that we're primates, too. And the embarrassing primate books are best. Macachiavellian Intelligence is an excellently embarrassing primate book, and just the thing to make us blush and shuffle our feet.

Michael Bywater

#22. I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

Angela Carter

#23. Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show truly staggering ability to 'ignore' certain kinds of information - that which does not 'fit' their imprinted/ conditioned reality-tunnel

Robert Anton Wilson

#24. So, if you were to divide your school in to subsections of the animal kingdom, or, let's just say into primates ...

Kate Ellison

#25. 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.

Jane Goodall

#26. And I tell you one thing, if the primates that we came from, had know that someday politicians would come out of the gene pool, they would have stayed up in the trees and written evolution off as a bad idea.

John Sheridan

#27. Though bonobos tend to be a lot hairier than us - and they don't build houses or churches or Pentagons like we do - these primates look and act remarkably human. They often even go beyond the merely "human," and enter the realm of the truly "humane.

Susan Block

#28. (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

#29. We remain of the view that in many areas of research we are still reliant on primates to achieve our goals for improving human health

Colin Blakemore

#30. Non-human primates spend hours a day grooming each other. And with humans, touching is also important. It's a way to form bonds and connect in modern society. But you can also speed up the use of conscious purposes once you're aware of that, and it can be manipulated.

Leonard Mlodinow

#31. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material.

George Gaylord Simpson

#32. 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

#33. I actually taught perceptual psychology at N.Y.U. when I was younger. I was interested in the aesthetic impulse in lower primates. But what really interested me in Dian Fossey was that she made a difference - she saved the gorillas.

Arne Glimcher

#34. 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.

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

Christopher Hitchens

#36. 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

#37. In this wonderful human brain of ours there has dawned a realization unknown to the other primates. It is that of the individual, conscious of himself as such, and aware that he, and all that he cares for, will one day die.

Joseph Campbell

#38. The evolutionary struggle for survival is really a self-serving series of blows and stabs, and yet it can lead to extremely social animals like dolphins, wolves or, for that matter, primates.

Frans De Waal

#39. I am a vegetarian because I realized that even little chickens suffer pain and fear, experience a range of feelings and emotions, and are as intelligent as mammals, including dogs, cats, and even some primates.

Paul McCartney

#40. - Chickens have a twenty-minute memory. We primates cope through booze and denial. Dial up more of that denial part, you'll last longer.

Ellen Datlow

#41. It seems profoundly unlikely that our universe has been designed to reward individual primates for killing one another while believing in the divine origin of a specific book.

Sam Harris

#42. When it comes to love
we are primates breaking sticks
while pointing to our hearts.

Atticus Poetry

#43. If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, then children are somewhat closer to our roots as primates in the arboreal forest. Humans appear to be the only primates that I know of that are afraid of heights. All other primates, when they're scared, they run up a tree, where they feel safe.

Richard Preston

#44. Marriage probably originated as a straightforward food-for-sex deal among foraging primates. Compatibility was not a big issue, nor, of course, was there any tension over who would control the remote.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#45. In the same way that humans have a "handy" intelligence, which we share with other primates, elephants may have a "trunky" one. There

Frans De Waal

#46. 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

#47. When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.

Albert Camus

#48. Studies of reconciliation in primates have demonstrated that if the relationship value increases between two parties they are more willing to make peace.

Frans De Waal

#49. The golden langur is one of the world's rarest primates, noted for its expressive black face set off by a robe of dense golden fur.

Eric Dinerstein

#50. We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from "I think I understand" to "I understand," we need to see the sights and feel the motions.

Steven Pinker

#51. 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

#52. Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.

Michael Shermer

#53. Man could no longer be regarded as the Lord of Creation, a being apart from the rest of nature. He was merely the representative of one among many Families of the order Primates in the class Mammalia.

Charles Darwin

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

Paul Ford

#55. At the time, science had declared humans unique, since we were so much better at identifying faces than any other primate. No one seemed bothered by the fact that other primates had been tested mostly on human faces rather than those of their own kind.

Frans De Waal

#56. 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

#57. The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.

H. Allen Smith

#58. Other primates get on with their own reproduction relatively soon after weaning, with gorillas having their first baby just seven or so years later.

Marlene Zuk

#59. In primates at least, infanticide seems to have been the crucial factor driving the evolution of monogamous mating systems.

Robin I.M. Dunbar

#60. Since the Unistat primates, like other domesticated hominids, did not know they were primates, all this was explained by a ferocious amount of ink excretions invoking Morality and Ideology, the twin gods of domesticated primatedom.

Robert Anton Wilson

#61. We're just a conceited naked ape, but in our minds we're some 'divine legend' and we see ourselves as some sort of god, thinking we can decide what will live and what will die, what will be saved and what will be destroyed, but honestly we're just a bunch of primates out of control.

Paul Watson

#62. Amazing how much we've managed to do, considering how we're doing it all with jumped-up social primates and evolutionary behaviors from the Pleistocene.

James S.A. Corey

#63. This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about.

Terence McKenna

#64. 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

#65. Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves.

Jonathan Haidt

#66. Primates are the only animals on the face of the earth that can taste sweet and see color. We were designed by nature to see, grasp, eat, and enjoy the flavor of colorful, sweet fruits.

Joel Fuhrman

#67. What is a potto?"
"It is a little furry creature that sleeps all day with its head between its legs and then walks about very, very slowly all night, high in the trees, slowly eating leaves and creeping up on birds as they roost and eating them too.

Patrick O'Brian

#68. 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

#69. A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.

Jacob M. Appel

#70. This is where the whole ape-descended thing reveals its worth, I thought madly. Sucks to be you, quadruped. Opposable thumbs - don't leave home without them.

Ben Aaronovitch

#71. Never call anyone a baboon unless you are sure of your facts.

Will Cuppy

#72. No existing form of anthropoid ape is even remotely related to the stock which has given rise to man.

Henry Fairfield Osborn

#73. When we are bad, we are worse than any primate that I know. And when we are good, we are actually better and more altruistic than any primate that I know.

Frans De Waal

#74. Our probable ancestors, Homo erectus and Homo habilis -now extinct- are classified as of the same genus (Homo) but of different species, although no one (at least lately) has attempted the appropriate experiments to see if crosses of them with us would produce fertile offspring.

Carl Sagan