89 Primates Quotes

Following is our list of primates quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about chimp.

Quick Jump To

Famous Primates Quotes

Primates are really well designed to see who is not keeping up their end of the deal. — Robert M. Sapolsky

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

The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists. — H. Allen Smith

When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives. — Albert Camus

If a male primate is mean to a female primate, her whole family will come after him. We don't have that sort of accountability in industrial societies. — Robert M. Sapolsky

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there. — Henry James

Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes. — Richard Dawkins

All monkeys cannot hang from the same branch. — African Proverbs

We may prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels, but in reality we are rising apes. — Desmond Morris

Who are we? That is the big question. And essentially we are just an upright-walking, big-brained, super-intelligent ape. — Louise Leakey

We are born of risen apes, not fallen angels. — Robert Ardrey

Ns are poster children for psychosocial stress, living in troops with bruising and shifting dominance hierarchies among males and high rates of male aggression. — Robert M. Sapolsky

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special. — Stephen Hawking

Orangutan are very weird animals but they look very soulful. — Dave Barry

Short Primates Quotes

  • I think we give human beings too much credit. We're primates, you know. — Eric Andre
  • Primates will continue to play social games without the least insight into what is killing them. — Keith Henson
  • One of the great commandments of science is: 'Mistrust arguments from authority.' — Carl Sagan
  • God was created by evolution, inside the imagination of a primate. — Steve Fowler
  • We are just another primate but a very confused, malleable one. — Robert M. Sapolsky
  • The only option is politeness-remember always that you are dealing with other primates. — Paul Ford
  • There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors. — Frans de Waal
  • Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves. — Jonathan Haidt
  • If anybody wants to believe they're the descendants of a primate, they're welcome to do it. — Mike Huckabee

Chimpanzee Quotes

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

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

The chimpanzees in the zoos do it, Some courageous kangaroos do it Let's do it, let's fall in love. I'm sure giraffes on the sly do it, Even eagles as they fly do it, Let's do it, let's fall in love. — Cole Porter

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

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. — Peter Singer

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

I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws. — S. J. Perelman

We’ve got ninety-nine per cent the same genes as any other person. We’ve got ninety per cent the same as a chimpanzee. We’ve got thirty per cent the same as a lettuce. Does that cheer you up at all? I love about the lettuce. It makes me feel I belong. — Caryl Churchill

Chimpanzees, more than any other living creature, have helped us to understand that there is no sharp line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. It's a very blurry line, and it's getting more blurry all the time. — Jane Goodall

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

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. — Adriaan Kortlandt

Chimp Quotes

This is how diseases are usually spread. Someone spits on a guy, somebody has sex with a chimp. Next thing you know . . . AIDS. — CM Punk

If one compares the sequence of amino acids that go to form the protein haemoglobin, it becomes apparent that humans and chimps are identical and do not differ in a single site. — Simon Conway Morris

When I was doing Dobie Gillis, I got blasted off to the moon with a chimp in a rocket, and I landed on a deserted tropic island. That should have told me something was coming. — Bob Denver

If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimp have to be before killing him constitutes murder? — Carl Sagan

Humans cannot produce viable offspring with our closest animal cousin: the chimpanzee. We cannot impregnate a chimp. So you know what that means? No condoms. — Chris Hardwick

By comparing the human and chimp genomes, we can see the process of evolution clearly in the changes (in DNA) since we diverged from our common ancestor. — Bob Waterston

Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral. — Frans de Waal

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. — Robert Trivers

Sometimes you think they must have come out of the chimp cages at the Bronx zoo. — Gerry Cheevers

She gave me the jabs and said I was covered for every worst-case scenario, including being bitten by a dirty chimp. I told her this is why we have over-population problems. Why are idiots who annoy dirty chimps being protected? — Karl Pilkington

People Writing About Primates

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Robert M. Sapolsky

Robert M. Sapolsky
quotes on life, love and leadership

114 481
Read quotes by H. Allen Smith

H. Allen Smith

9 74
Read quotes by Albert Camus

Albert Camus
quotes on love, life and absurdity

975 9693
Read quotes by Henry James

Henry James
quotes on writing, love and death

251 1241
Read quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche
quotes on god, love and morality

2473 32550
Read quotes by Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins
quotes on life, creation and intelligent design

665 4628

More Primates Quotes

We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves. — Marquis De Sade

I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates. — Angela Carter

Like it or not, we are slightly fat, furless, bipedal primates who crave sugar, salt, fat, and starch, but we are still adapted to eating a diverse diet of fibrous fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, tubers, and lean meat. We enjoy rest and relaxation, but our bodies are still those of endurance athletes evolved to walk many miles a day and often run, as well as dig, climb and carry. — Daniel Lieberman

If you’re a gazelle, you don’t have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It’s not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression. — Robert M. Sapolsky

I am a vegetarian because I realized that even little chickens suffer pain and fear, experience a range of feelings and emotions, and are as intelligent as mammals, including dogs, cats, and even some primates. — Sayings

The stress response is incredibly ancient evolutionarily. Fish, birds and reptiles secrete the same stress hormones we do, yet their metabolism doesn’t get messed up the way it does in people and other primates. — Robert M. Sapolsky

We're just a conceited, naked ape. But in our minds we're some sort of "divine legend," and we see ourselves as some sort of god. That we can walk around the earth deciding who will live and who will die and what will be destroyed and what will be saved. But the fact is we're just a bunch of primates out of control. — Paul Watson

We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable? — Steven Pinker

The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics). — Robert Anton Wilson

Primates are the only animals on the face of the earth that can taste sweet and see color. We were designed by nature to see, grasp, eat, and enjoy the flavor of colorful, sweet fruits. — Joel Fuhrman

Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death. — Roddy McDowall

Everybody who has ever worked for a corporation knows that corporations conspire all the time. Politicians conspire all the time, pot-dealers conspire not to get caught by the narcs, the world is full of conspiracies. Conspiracy is natural primate behavior. — Robert Anton Wilson

Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material. — George Gaylord Simpson

I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities. — Frans de Waal

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. — Desmond Morris

Why is it that it's okay to call a white person "mate" yet it's not okay to call a black guy "primate"? — Frankie Boyle

We are by far the most contradictory of all primates. An animal with this much internal conflict has never lived on this earth. — Frans de Waal

Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education. — Muriel Barbery

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. — Francis Collins

Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates. — Terence McKenna

Studies of reconciliation in primates have demonstrated that if the relationship value increases between two parties they are more willing to make peace. — Frans de Waal

Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show truly staggering ability to 'ignore' certain kinds of information - that which does not 'fit' their imprinted/ conditioned reality-tunnel — Robert Anton Wilson

Primates are very territorial. It is in their nature to protect their food resources as well as their females and young. — Jane Goodall

Our most serious obstacle is the uncontrollable urge to convert everything to the familiar, to reduce it all to the level of the primate brain; to reject the living, breathing reality of the totality of all possible attention. — E. J. Gold

And I tell you one thing, if the primates that we came from, had know that someday politicians would come out of the gene pool, they would have stayed up in the trees and written evolution off as a bad idea. — John Sheridan

The evolutionary struggle for survival is really a self-serving series of blows and stabs, and yet it can lead to extremely social animals like dolphins, wolves or, for that matter, primates. — Frans de Waal

In humans, the family prevents infanticide. Next to language, the core family, consisting of a mother, a father and children, is the greatest difference between us and other primates. — Frans de Waal

Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty, was successfully practised; honours, gifts, and immunities were offered and accepted as the price of an episcopal vote; and the condemnation of the Alexandrian primate was artfully represented as the only measure which could restore the peace and union of the catholic church. — Edward Gibbon

Marriage probably originated as a straightforward food-for-sex deal among foraging primates. Compatibility was not a big issue, nor, of course, was there any tension over who would control the remote. — Barbara Ehrenreich

As a species, we tend to lie quite a bit - to ourselves and to each other. It's a primate thing. So, a reason to go into a career in science and technology, or to learn more about these subjects, is to become a more powerful person. — Ann Druyan

Contrary to general belief, humans imitate apes more than the reverse. The sight of monkeys or apes induces an irresistible urge in people to jump up and down, exaggeratedly scratch themselves and holler in a way that must make the primates wonder how this otherwise so intelligent species has come to depend on such inferior means of communication. — Frans de Waal

As this VP discovered, being a boss is much like being a high-status primate in any group: the creatures beneath you in the pecking order watch every move you make – and so they know a lot more about you than you know about them. — Bob Sutton

One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.) — Carl Sagan

But let us not forget that human love and compassion are equally deeply rooted in our primate heritage, and in this sphere too our sensibilities are of a higher order of magnitude than those of chimpanzees. — Jane Goodall

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

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. — Frans de Waal

In Conclusion

Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of primates quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about primates to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.

Citation

Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of primates quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.

Embed HTML Link

Copy and paste this HTML code in your webpage