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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“They's a lot of no-good sonofabitches out there."
Arvin asks, "More than a hundred?"
Willard laughed a little and put the truck in gear. "Yeah, at least that many.”
― Donald Ray Pollock, quote from The Devil All the Time
“The abbot told me once that lying was a betrayal to one's self. It's evidence of self-loathing. You see, when you are so ashamed of your actions, thoughts, or intentions, you lie to hide it rather than accept yourself for who you really are. The idea of how others see you becomes more important than the reality of you. It's like when a man would rather die than be thought of as a coward. His life is not as important to him as his reputation. In the end, who is the braver? The man who dies rather than be thought of as a coward or the man who lives willing to face who he really is?”
― Michael J. Sullivan, quote from The Crown Conspiracy
“What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.)”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.”
― Carson McCullers, quote from The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories
“Someday, we’ll run into each other again, I know it.
Maybe I’ll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens,
that’s when I’ll deserve you. But now, at this moment, you can’t hook
your boat to mine, because I’m liable to sink us both.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, quote from Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
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