Mike Mills Quotes

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.

With land-roaming animals, I've just read so much about the sophistication of their emotional lives and their intelligence and the way they process information that betrays a greater intelligence.

Pigs are smarter than dogs, and both are smarter than Congress.

One would wonder to hear skeptical men disputing for the reason of animals, and telling us it is only our pride and prejudices that will not allow them the use of that faculty. Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation, or the continuance of his species. Animals in their generation are wiser than the sons of men; but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass. Take a brute out of his instinct, and you find him wholly deprived of understanding.

There is not, in my opinion, anything more mysterious in nature than this instinct in animals, which thus rise above reason, and yet fall infinitely short of it.

What is denominated discretion in man we call cunning in brutes.

Animals have personalities and minds and emotions.

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment.

When I see a dolphin, I know it's just as smart as I am.

If a cat does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

You cannot share your life with a dog, as I had done in Bournemouth, or a cat, and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings.

The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.

From the lowest animals of which we can affirm intelligence up to man this type of intellect is found.

Right now, any opinion anyone has about whether dogs can or cannot really tell when their owner is coming home by some unknown means... nobody knows. The weight of evi dence suggests they can.

I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don't have what we call intelligence, and they're surviving just fine.

Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness. Only man seems to be endowed with this faculty; he alone develops disinterested intelligence, intelligence that is not primarily concerned with his own safety and well-being but that looks abroad upon things.

We think of computers as smart and powerful machines. But your goldfish is smarter.

Elephants are very sensitive to smell and they tend to recognise us by our body odour.

Horses do sense things way before people.

I would like to visit a dog's mind to know what he's thinking and feeling.

Cats and dogs are a very good window into the natural world: a chance to see how another species lives and deals with its problems, what they like and what they don't like.

One of the things we found out as we filmed with people who dealt with chimps, and with all animals, and it's really incredible, is their levels of intelligence that we don't recognize right away.

Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal.

Even a cat has things it can do that AI cannot.