Robert Sapolsky Quotes

On the day-long follows that I used to do with mothers and their offspring - these chimp families that I knew so well - there was hardly a day when I didn't learn something new about them.

Perhaps measuring animal intelligence by comparing it to human intelligence isn't the best litmus test.

Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.

How like us is that filthy beast the ape.

I always compare human beings to animals. It's a nice way to figure out who they are.

Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.

Chimps are far too much human to be my favorite animal.

In the distance, the gestures of animals look human, the gestures of human beings bestial.

The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

The part that always shocked me was the inter-community violence among the chimps: the patrols and the vicious attacks on strangers that lead to death. It's an unfortunate parallel to human behavior - they have a dark side just as we do. We have less excuse, because we can deliberate, so I believe only we are capable of true calculated evil.

I thought if I could understand why apes get mean and horrible and aggressive when they grow up, maybe I could understand why people get mean and horrible and aggressive and have wars.

There is something really mysterious about lions. They could rip you apart if they wanted to, but at the same time they look so cuddly. Can you imagine what humans look like to animals? They must think we're so weird.

The chimpanzee study was - well, it's still going on, and I think it's taught us perhaps more than anything else to be a little humble; that we are, indeed, unique primates, we humans, but we're simply not as different from the rest of the animal kingdom as we used to think.

Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.

I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker - yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

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

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

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties.

Ethologists are often accused of drawing false analogies between animal and human behaviour. However, no such thing as a false analogy exists: an analogy can be more or less detailed and, hence, more or less informative.

I am always incorrigibly interested in the behaviour of the 'human animal', and look forward to perusing divers effusions of your lively pen.

He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.

Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass.

You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer.

Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either.