Quotes by Frans de Waal

“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?”

“The initial animosity between divergent approaches can be overcome if we realize that each has something to offer that the other lacks. We may weave them together into a new whole that is stronger ...”

“Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality. Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over ...”

“It is said that man is wolf to man. I find this very unfair to wolves.”

“Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye ...”

“If faith makes people buy an entire package of myths and values without asking too many questions, scientists are only slightly better.”

“The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want, from tolerance to intolerance, and from altruism to greed. Its good to realize, though, that if biologists never stop ta...”

“We have a tendency to describe the human condition in lofty terms, such as a quest for freedom or striving for a virtuous life, but the life sciences hold a more mundane view: Its all about securit...”

“I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we'd known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around...”

“Having escaped the Dark Ages in which animals were mere stimulus-response machines, we are free to contemplate their mental lives. It is a great leap forward, the one that Griffin fought for. But n...”

“[T]he term 'nonhuman' grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something. Poor things, they are nonhuman! When students embrace this jargon i...”

“Our societies probably work best if they mimic as closely as possible the small-scale communities of our ancestors. We certainly did not evolve to live in cities with millions of people where we bu...”

“Ironically, torture requires empathy, too, in the sense that one cannot deliberately inflict pain without realizing what is painful.”

“Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the God is dead phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a re...”

“The term 'alpha female' originated in my field of animal behavior, but has acquired new meaning. It refers to women who are in charge, for example, by flirting and dating on their own terms. It is ...”

“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, th...”

“The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.”

“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 all...”

“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...”

“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 fo...”