Frans de Waal Quotes

The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people.

My study of the wild gorilla is not yet finished, and even when it is complete, it will contribute only a small part toward man's understanding of his closest animal relatives, the great apes. But one conclusion is already clear: The gorilla is one of the most maligned animals in the world.

I will be doing a film called Whispers, for Disney. It's about elephants, and doesn't have any people in it. It will be a live action film - I don't know how much I can say about it, since I still don't know too much about it.

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

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

I just can't remember a time when I wasn't involved with animals and wildlife.

People are animals, man.

Animals interest me more than anything else.

Anthropomorphism is such an interesting concept. It means projecting human thoughts and emotions onto an animal. Which implies that thoughts and feelings belong to humans alone. Of course, if you believe in evolution, or if you believe in the Bible, that's not so. Both evolution and the Bible tell us that we're part of a family.

I was always interested in animals, but when I was little, animal behavior was still a new science. It was available to become a veterinarian, it was available to study biology, but not specifically animal behavior. In the '60s, Jane Goodall was the founder of this new science.

The beliefs I was raised with - to respect animals and to be aware of nature, to understand that we share this planet with other creatures - have had a huge impact on me.

Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.

We ogle plants and animals up close on television, the Internet and in the movies. We may not worship the animals we see, but we still regard them as necessary physical and spiritual companions. Technological nature can't completely satisfy that yearning.

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 think that there are many aspects to the relationship between humans and animals. But briefly, humans appear to have always been fascinated by them from the time of cave paintings and before.

I probably shouldn't say this about all animals, but at least the farm animals that I've hung out with, and even when I go to the zoo usually, they're like a blank slate. I guess that's why I like them. They're puppets, and you can imagine them being anything you want.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

The older I get, the more individuality I find in animals and the less I find in humans.

You know, if you have a zoo you don't want the other creatures to see you. You want them to hang out and act properly and, you know, when the monkeys will come and ask for the bananas, they won't act like monkeys. If you want them to act on what their true nature is, you've got to leave them alone.

I actually taught perceptual psychology at N.Y.U. when I was younger. I was interested in the aesthetic impulse in lower primates. But what really interested me in Dian Fossey was that she made a difference - she saved the gorillas.

I'm a paleoanthropologist, and my job is to define man's place in nature and explore what makes us human.

Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.

I just don't think I've had the desire yet to write a vicious animal - like a dog-gone-bad or anything - where I do feel that I need a balance of all types of humans.

There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.