Desmond Morris Quotes.
The roots of our Soccer Tribe lie deep in our primeval past.
This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time ignoring his fundamental ones.
Biologically speaking, if something bites you it’s more likely to be female.
The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.
Monks, nuns, long-term spinsters and bachelors and permanent homosexuals are all, in a reproductive sense, aberrant. Society has bred them, but they have failed to return the compliment.
The idea that it is funny to see wild animals coerced into acting like clumsy humans, or thrilling to see powerful beasts reduced to cringing cowards by a whip-cracking trainer, is primitive and medieval. It stems from the old idea that we are superior to other species and have the right to hold dominion over them.
Life is like a very short visit to a toyshop between birth and death.
Life is like a very short visit to a toy shop between birth and death.
A true bond of friendship is usually only possible between people of roughly equal status. This equality is demonstrated in many indirect ways, but it is reinforced in face-to-face encounters by a matching of the posture of relaxation or alertness.
We may prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels, but in reality we are rising apes.
I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape.
Aquatic animals suffer from the disadvantage that they cannot scream when in pain, so we find it hard to gauge the degree of their agony. If fish could scream, angling purely for sport would be outlawed without delay.
Looking back now on the whole sexual scene we can see that our species has remained much more loyal to its basic biological urges than we might at first imagine. Its primate sexual system with carnivore modifications has survived all the fantastic technological advances remarkably well.
We are to put it mildly, in a mess, and there is a strong chance that we shall have exterminated ourselves by the end of the century. Our only consolation will be that as a species, we have had an exciting term of office.
We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species.
There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens. The zoologist now has to start making comparisons. Where else is nudity at a premium.
Under crowded conditions the friendly social interactions between members of a group become reduced, and the destructive and aggressive patterns show a marked rise in frequency and intensity.
The female covers her breasts, and then proceeds to redefine their shape with a brassiere. This sexual signaling device may be padded or inflatable, so that it not only reinstates the concealed shape, but also enlarges it, imitating in this way the breast swelling that occurs during sexual arousal.
