Alex Honnold Quotes

Way down deep, we're all motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them.

I think there's a supreme power behind the whole thing, an intelligence. Look at all of the instincts of nature, both animals and plants, the very ingenious ways they survive. If you cut yourself, you don't have to think about it.

Self-preservation, nature's first great law, all the creatures, except man, doth awe.

Surviving is not something you need to learn. You don't need to learn survival skills; you have them already. That's why we're here, all of us, because it's a game of survival anyway.

Man is more ape than many of the apes.

Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

We lost this animal instinct that we used to have. We use a very low percentage of our instinct.

Our aggression is a deep instinct which survives in all kinds of manifestations in modern man.

We spent an enormous amount of time as hominids and as primates living as hunter-gatherers. That is the natural way for us to live, and we're suddenly living in this profoundly unnatural way, and we're still in the process of adapting to it and working out how to live with it.

How like us is that filthy beast the ape.

The sheep are happier of themselves than under the care of the wolves.

With highly civilized nations, continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes. Nevertheless the more intelligent members within the same community will succeed better in the long run than the inferior, and leave a more numerous progeny, and this is a form of natural selection.

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.

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

I thought we'd just sequence the genome once and that would be sufficient for most things in people's lifetimes. Now we're seeing how changeable and adaptable it is, which is why we're surviving and evolving as a species.

I think walking is a little more primal than art-making.

I've learned to climb a tree pretty fast.

The movements we do are complex but natural, they're picking stuff up off the ground, running, jumping, climbing - stuff that we were made to do, that we were created to do.

Basically, we are all chimps. The human side is at the front of our forehead, but the chimp is the part that lashes out. When I play, I am completely chimp-orientated.

People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.

The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.

We are bipedal apes, and it should not be surprising to see that fact reflected in the way our ancestors lived.

This is the effect of panic, a natural effect, you could say that animal nature is like this, plant life would behave in exactly the same way, too, if it did not have all those roots to hold it in the ground, and how nice it would be to see the trees of the forest fleeing the flames.

At least once every human should have to run for his life, to teach him that milk does not come from supermarkets, that safety does not come from policemen, that 'news' is not something that happens to other people. He might learn how his ancestors lived and that he himself is no different--in the crunch his life depends on his agility, alertness, and personal resourcefulness.

The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.