Jane Goodall Quotes

The chimps' way of aggression is quick and brutal. I compare them to gang attacks.

It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.

We have beastly qualities within us. If we're put into certain circumstances, and the walls around us come in tighter and tighter, we all could maybe do dangerous things.

People are only animals, but special animals. Every animal has fought and killed to survive, even before the dinosaurs. We're the only ones that do it for fun. That's why I don't know about Darwinism. Supposedly evolution and natural selection are all about survival, but we haven't gotten smarter over the years, only more dangerous.

Men are beasts and even beasts don't behave as they do.

I think that genetically we're programmed to battle each other.

Man is to man either a god or a wolf.

When humans behave murderously, such as inflicting senseless slaughter of innocents in warfare, we like to blame it on some dark, 'animalistic' instinct.

Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive.

In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.

We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal.

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.

His passion has aroused the best and the beast in man. And the beast waited for him in the kitchen.

A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.

Violent and quarrelsome men often come to a bloody end.

There is indeed the possibility that the evolutionary process has, in gray antiquity, bred into us an excess of aggression.

I think that maybe human beings are conditioned to violence.

Violence is literally the glue of the cycle of life, and yet I think that we're the only species that does it maliciously.

One thing I can't prove, but I firmly believe is that two men were put on this earth - one threw a punch and a third guy came over and watched. And that happened before anybody ever threw or kicked a ball.

...In little more than a single century from 1820 to 19450, no less than fifty-nine million human animals were killed in inter-group clashes of one sort or another.... We describe these killings as men behaving "like animals," but if we could find a wild animal that showed signs of acting this way, it would be more precise to describe it as behaving like men.

I have seen Tasmanian devils battle over a carcass. I have seen lionesses crowding a kill, dingoes on the trail of a feral piglet, and adult croc thrashing its prey to pieces. But never, in all the animal world, have I witnessed anything to match the casual cruelty of the human being.

We are territorial, power-hungry and even more brutal than chimpanzees.

I don't like the human race in general. We are the only species who hunt for sport, who kill due to emotional need.

Man is the only animal who causes pain to others with no other object than wanting to do so.