Chimpanzees Quotes

To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.

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.

I think if you’re good and you can persuade people you’re going to be able to do that role and ultimately the audience buys it, then it doesn’t matter whether you were really a chimpanzee in disguise! You’ve done it.

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.

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.

Children, behold the Chimpanzee:
He sits on the ancestral tree
From which we sprang in ages gone.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

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

Other people have talked about chimpanzees being a window into the past, which I suppose is true, in a way.

Certainly the first true humans were unique by virtue of their large brains. It was because the human brain is so large when compared with that of a chimpanzee that paleontologists for years hunted for a half-ape, half-human skeleton that would provide a fossil link between the human and the ape.

The gods thatп»ї we’ve made are exactly the gods you’d expect to be made by a species that’s about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.

Once I saw a chimpanzee gaze at a particularly beautiful sunset for a full 15 minutes, watching the changing colors [and then] retire to the forest without picking a pawpaw for supper.

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.

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.

A chimpanzee could learn what I do physically, but it goes way beyond that. When you play, you play life.

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.

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.

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.

The chimpanzee and the human share about 99.5 percent of their evolutionary history, yet most human thinkers regard the chimp as a malformed, irrelevant oddity, while seeing themselves as stepping stones to the Almighty.

Considering the very close genetic relationship that has been established by comparison of biochemical properties of blood proteins, protein structure and DNA, and immunological responses, the differences between a man and a chimpanzee are more astonishing than the resemblances.

Jane Goodall is my idol and someone I have always looked up to for the amazing work she has done with chimpanzees. She has transcended animal welfare as the voice for the voiceless and has changed many people’s views about how they think and treat not only chimps but all of the amazing animals we share this planet with.

Chimpanzees are an evolutionary hair’s-width from us…. Now imagine a species on Earth, or anywhere else, as smart compared with humans as humans are compared with chimpanzees. How much of the universe might they figure out?

Consider a cow. A cow doesn’t have the problem-solving skill of a chimpanzee, which has discovered how to get termites out of the ground by putting a stick into a hole. Evolution has developed the brain’s ability to solve puzzles, and at the same time has produced in our brain a pleasure of solving problems.

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

We are territorial, power-hungry and even more brutal than chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutan shave 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.

The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.

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.

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.

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.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The suffix ‘naut’ comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests ‘a sailor in space.’ Chimponaut suggests ‘a chimpanzee in sailor pants’.

One cannot watch chimpanzee infants for long without realizing that they have the same emotional need for affection and reassurance as human children.

There are some circumstances, for example, where the newborn baby is severely disabled and where the parents think that it’s better that child should not live, when killing the newborn baby is not at all wrong … not like killing the chimpanzee would be.

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.

There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche’s doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee.

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

Chimpanzees can be quite political.

The fact that all our ape cousins – chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans – can acquire signs – is powerful evidence that our hominid ancestors’ first language was gestural and that the vocal version of language was a relatively recent development. My own guess is that vocal language began emerging about 200,000 years ago.

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.

Rather than something like King Kong where I really went after studying gorillas in the wild and captivity. I based Caesar [ from the Rise of the Planet of the Apes] on a real chimpanzee and I worked with Terry [Notary] on a lot of chimpanzee movement.

An evolutionary biologist and a fundamentalist may see the same chimpanzee sitting in a cage, but in another important way, they do not. And they may approach the details of their lives in very different ways.

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.

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.

I have shown that Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees.

We evolved. We have only to look at the pouting face of a young chimpanzee to laugh at its reflections of ourselves. We know that more then 98 percent of our genes are shared with the chimpanzee, but we feel the kinship directly when the furry baby puts up its arms to be held.

If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine – but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you’ve been bad or good – and CARES about any of it – to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.

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