Stephen Leacock Quotes

I'm in the role of helping these apes negotiate the human role. I'm just a temporary intermediary in what I think will be eventual communication between the two species.

if we don't always understand animals, they always understand us.

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking - all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.

To me, animal communication seemed an insane idea, years ago; but my experience altered my life and my beliefs.

Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored

What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.

Communication: the thing humans forgot when we invented words.

Language. By this we build pyramids, fight battles, ordain and administer laws, shape and teach religion, and knit man to man, cultivate each other, and ourselves.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

I speak with dogs frequently. They don't really talk, but I feel they're communicating.

I can watch anybody all day long if they're really doing what they're doing. I have a fascination with human behavior, watching people talk, when they pick at their face or how they hold their hand or if they're listening to you, if they're not listening to you.

human animals and nonhuman animals can communicate quite well; if we are brought up around animals as children we take this for granted. By the time we are adults we no longer remember.

I want to talk to him. I want to ask him about that girl and if he loved her and still misses her. Nothing, however, exits my mouth. How well do we really let ourselves know each other? There's a long quietness until I finally break it open. It reminds me of someone breaking bread and handing it out. In my case, I hand out a question to my friend.

The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.

I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.

Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.

Eyes...They speak all languages.

The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.

Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.

I don't need to kill goats to say things. I CAN talk.

At the end of the day, storytelling is actually very simple in its origin as long as there are people who want to tell stories and there are people who want to hear them.

Anyone can speak Troll. All you have to do is point and grunt.

Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.