Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" People want to work with somebody who feels shame, who worries about the perceptions of others. Dishonesty is something we don't like in others. "

Related Quotes:

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

" If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation. "

" I describe in 'Chimpanzee Politics' how the alpha male needs broad support to reach the top spot. He needs some close allies and he needs many group members to be on his side. "

" If one bird foraging in a flock on the ground suddenly takes off, all other birds will take off immediately after, before they even know what's going on. The one who stays behind may be prey. "

" Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock. "

" The thinking is that we started evolving language not by speaking but by gesturing. "

" 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. "

" War is evitable if conditions are such that the costs of making war are higher than the benefits. "

" The role of inequity in society is grossly underestimated. Inequity is not good for your health, basically. "

" If there is any form of contagion that is adaptive, it is the immediate response to the fear of others. If others are fearful, there may be good reason for you to be fearful too. "

" In Africa, we have the bush meat trade, which means that, on a very large scale, animals are being killed in the forests and sold in the cities as a luxury food. "

" The primate laugh is given in playful contexts, and as such has a strong similarity to the human laugh. "

" The sturdiest pillars of human morality are compassion and a sense of justice. "

" It is hard to get animals which normally pay little attention to each other to do things together. One can teach dolphins to jump simultaneously out of the water precisely because they show similar behavior spontaneously, but try to make two domestic cats jump together and you will fail. "

" Unlike the primate hand, the elephant's grasping organ is also its nose. Elephants use their trunks not only to reach food but also to sniff and touch it. With their unparalleled sense of smell, the animals know exactly what they are going for. Vision is secondary. "

" The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be. "

" Empathy probably started out as a mechanism to improve maternal care. Mammalian mothers who were attentive to their young's needs were more likely to rear successful offspring. "

" Deep down, creationists realize they will never win factual arguments with science. This is why they have construed their own science-like universe, known as Intelligent Design, and eagerly jump on every tidbit of information that seems to go their way. "

" Most exotic animals are not particularly interested in people, which makes it hard to provoke them. Human-rearing gets them used to and sometimes imprinted on humans, which makes them potentially dangerous. "

" I am personally not against keeping animals at zoos, as they serve a huge educational purpose, but treating them well and with respect seems the least we could do, and with 'we' I mean not just zoo staff, but most certainly also the public. "

" Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it. "

" Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species. "

" Darwin wasn't just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes - he didn't go far enough. We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament. "

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

" The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species. "

" Bonobo studies started in the '70s and came to fruition in the '80s. Then in the '90s, all of a sudden, boom, they ended because of the warfare in the Congo. It was really bad for the bonobo and ironic that people with their warfare were preventing us from studying the hippies of the primate world. "

" 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. "

" I was raised Catholic. Not just a little bit Catholic, like my wife, Catherine. When she was young, many Catholics in France already barely went to church, except for the big three: baptism, marriage, and funeral. And only the middle one was by choice. "

" Human morality is unthinkable without empathy. "

" I think the sense of fairness in humans is very strongly developed, and that's why we react so strongly to all the bonuses received by Wall Street executives. We want to know why they deserve these benefits. "