Frans de Waal · 316 pages
Rating: (2.7K votes)
“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 violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We are Who We Are
“We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We are Who We Are
“on August 16, 1996, when an eight-year-old female gorilla named Binti Jua helped a three-year-old boy who had fallen eighteen feet into the primate exhibit at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Reacting immediately, Binti scooped up the boy and carried him to safety. She sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a few gentle back pats before taking him to the waiting zoo staff. This simple act of sympathy, captured on video and shown around the world, touched many hearts, and Binti was hailed as a heroine. It was the first time in U.S. history that an ape figured in the speeches of leading politicians, who held her up as a model of compassion.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We are Who We Are
“Ultimately these battles are about females, which means that the fundamental difference between our two closest relatives is that one resolves sexual issues with power, while the other resolves power issues with sex.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We are Who We Are
“The common argument that men are naturally polygamous and women naturally monogamous is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We are Who We Are
“We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We are Who We Are
“From an evolutionary perspective, nothing could be worse for a male than to eliminate his own progeny. It’s assumed, therefore, that nature has provided males with a rule of thumb to attack only infants of mothers with whom they have had no recent sex. This may seem foolproof for the males, but it opens the door for a brilliant female counterstrategy. By accepting the advances of many males, a female can buffer herself against infanticide because none of her mates can discard the possibility that her infant is his. In other words, it pays to sleep around.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We are Who We Are
“Conventions are often surrounded with the solemn language of morality, but in fact they have little to do with it.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We are Who We Are
“Humanity’s special place in the cosmos is one of abandoned claims and moving goalposts.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We are Who We Are
“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 bump into strangers everyone we go, are threatened by them in dark streets, sit next to them in the bus, and give them the finger in traffic jams.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We are Who We Are
Frans de Waal
Born place: in 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands
Born date October 29, 1948
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“You're holding your future self responsible for something your past self didn't know anything about. You can't judge your past behavior because of the way things turned out. You had no way of knowing what would happen next. It's only because you do know that you judge your past self.”
― E.K. Blair, quote from Fading
“Where'd you send her?"
"Siberia. Lovely this time of year. A bit remote, I'm afraid. Might take her weeks to find a town and even longer to arrange transportation back to the States."
My lips quirked. I didn't feel like laughing, but the image of my half-millenium-old grandmother trudging through snow was kind of funny. "You're sick, you know that?"
"What can I day? I thought a cold-hearted bitch like her would feel at home in the tundra.”
― Jaye Wells, quote from Red-Headed Stepchild
“Me, personally, I tell dude 137 how I'm adding an embossed slogan to my dildos. Cast in high-relief going around the base, it's going to say, "The Dick That Killed Cassie Wright..." On the thickest part, so if you twist it the letters of the writing stimulate the clit.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Snuff
“The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer. [6]”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital
“Love is when you feel safe in someone’s arms, when he’s the first thing you want to see in the morning, love is surrendering. You risk getting hurt but you don’t care. You are willing to give someone the power to break your heart. Love means seeing someone at their worst and still seeing the good in them, love means someone is perfect for you despite their imperfections”
― Cora Reilly, quote from Bound by Hatred
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