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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“For we have been there in the books and out of the books—and where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as we have been. A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practised the arts,”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from Green Hills of Africa
“Jehu, king of Israel from 841–814 BC, had engineered the slaughter of the descendants of Ahab at Jezreel in fulfillment of the prophecies of Elijah (1Ki 21:21; 2Ki 10:1–11). So Jezreel had become a picture of judgment as well as a warning to heed God’s prophets.”
― quote from Quest Study Bible: NIV
“Yet 'Reality' is just whatever illusion we believe in”
― Fola, quote from The Seed
“Christians should yield themselves wholly to the glorious God who has redeemed them, to delight in serving Him in whose fellowship heaven has already begun. To”
― Andrew Murray, quote from Daily in His Presence: A Classic Devotional from One of the Most Powerful Voices of the Nineteenth Century
“Lancelot and Guenever were sitting at the solar window. An observer of the present day, who knew the Arthurian legend only from Tennyson and people of that sort, would have been startled to see that the famous lovers were past their prime. We, who have learned to base our interpretation of love on the conventional boy-and-girl romance of Romeo and Juliet, would be amazed if we could step back into the Middle Ages - when the poet of chivalry could write about Man that he had 'en ciel un dieu, par terre une deesse'. Lovers were not recruited then among the juveniles and adolescents: they were seasoned people, who knew what they were about. In those days people loved each other for their lives, without the conveniences of the divorce court and the psychiatrist. They had a God in heaven and a goddess on earth - and, since people who devote themselves to godesses must exercise some caution about the ones to whom they are devoted, they neither chose them by the passing standards of the flesh alone, nor abandoned it lightly when the bruckle thing began to fail.”
― T.H. White, quote from The Candle in the Wind
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