Primates Quotes

“Everything is improved by the judicious application of primates.”

— Chris Roberson

God was created by evolution, inside the imagination of a primate.

— Steve Fowler

I think we give human beings too much credit. We're primates, you know.

— Eric Andre

One of the great commandments of science is: 'Mistrust arguments from authority.'

— Carl Sagan

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

— H. Allen Smith

No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.

— James S.A. Corey

We are just another primate but a very confused, malleable one.

— Robert M. Sapolsky

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

— Jonathan Haidt

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

— Frans de Waal

[A primate ban] would force us to abandon research that could lead to treatments for Alzheimer's, motor neurone disease, strokes and many…

— Tipu Aziz

I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves…

— Angela Carter

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

— Richard Leakey

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Frans de Waal

First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds.…

— Russell Banks

Marriage probably originated as a straightforward food-for-sex deal among foraging primates. Compatibility was not a big issue, nor, of course, was there…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

And I tell you one thing, if the primates that we came from, had know that someday politicians would come out of…

— John Sheridan

Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the…

— Malcolm Gladwell

Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been…

— Muriel Barbery

I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are…

— Frans de Waal

As a species, we tend to lie quite a bit - to ourselves and to each other. It's a primate thing. So,…

— Ann Druyan

This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call…

— Terence McKenna

Unlike the primate hand, the elephant's grasping organ is also its nose. Elephants use their trunks not only to reach food but…

— Frans de Waal

We belong to that order of mammals, the primates, distinguished by its propensity for repeated single litters, intense parental care, long life-spans,…

— Louise J. Kaplan

We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our…

— Murray Bookchin

A primatologist told me you can find love in the eyes of an orangutan. It's that old primate gleam that goes back…

— Shawn Thompson

“I’d been traveling in Asia long enough to know that monkeys there are nothing like their trombone-playing, tambourine-banging cousins I’d seen on…

— Christopher Ryan

Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of…

— Terence McKenna

I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans.…

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

None of the three great apes is considered ancestral to modern man, Homo sapiens, but they remain the only other type of…

— Dian Fossey

I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea urchins, gnats,…

— Lewis Thomas

“[H]umans live in a world where it's words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language.…

— Muriel Barbery

When we are bad, we are worse than any primate that I know. And when we are good, we are actually better…

— Frans de Waal

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

— Frans de Waal

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

— Christopher Hitchens

Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each…

— Robert Sapolsky

You know, there are just some things you never expect to face even on this job. A flying primate that shoots fire…

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

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

— Michael Shermer

If anybody wants to believe they're the descendants of a primate, they're welcome to do it.

— Mike Huckabee

Primates are hardwired for us/them dichotomies. Our brains detect them in less than 100 milliseconds.

— Robert Sapolsky