Quotes About Great Apes

“An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death-penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements-the animals that we call men-will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear. And yet armies are not built on fear. The Tsar's army fell to pieces not because of any lack of reprisals. In his attempt to save it by restoring the death-penalty, Kerensky only finished it. Upon the ashes of the great war, the Bolsheviks created a new army. These facts demand no explanation for any one who has even the slightest knowledge of the language of history. The strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October revolution, and the train supplied the front with this cement.”

— Leon Trotsky

“One of the many unintended consequences of the Anthropocene has been the pruning of our own family tree. Having cut down our sister species-the Neanderthals and the Denisovans-many generations ago, we're now working on our first and second cousins. By the time we're done, it's quite possible that there will be among the great apes not a single representative left, except, that is, for us.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“With the exception of humans, all the great apes today are facing oblivion.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes.”

— Jane Goodall

“We humans, as species, are interested in communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Would not a good beginning be improved communication with terrestral intelligence, with other human beings of different cultures and languages, with the great apes, with the dolphines, but particularly with those intelligent masters of the deep, the great whales?”

— Carl Sagan

“Treat each other like human beings? But the other great apes have no class hierarchy.”

— Bauvard

“As he drank, I remembered that there's a reason we English are ruled more by tea than by Buckingham Palace or His Majesty's Government: Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes
or so the Vicar had remarked to Father ...”

— Alan Bradley

“Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes.”

— Alan Bradley

“Early the next morning I was astir. Considerable freedom was allowed me, as Sola had informed me that so long as I did not attempt to leave the city I was free to go and come as I pleased. She had warned me, however, against venturing forth unarmed, as this city, like all other deserted metropolises of an ancient Martian civilization, was peopled by the great white apes of my second day's adventure.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

“Bagheera to see if the Panther was angry too, and Bagheera's eyes were as hard as jade stones. "Thou hast been with the Monkey People
the gray apes
the people without a law
the eaters of everything. That is great shame." "When Baloo hurt my head," said Mowgli (he was still on his back), "I went away, and the gray”

— Rudyard Kipling

“Never blame the man: his hard-pressed
Ancestors formed him: the other anthropoid apes were safe
In the great southern rain-forest and hardly changed
In a million years: but the race of man was made
By shock and agony ...
... a wound was made in the brain
When life became too hard, and has never healed.
It is there that they learned trembling religion and blood-
sacrifice,
It is there that they learned to butcher beasts and to slaughter
men,
And hate the world.”

— Robinson Jeffers

“Ask, 'How are we different from the great apes?' We have culture, we have civilisation, and we have language to be celebrated as part of being human.”

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

“Gorillas are the largest of the great apes. A mature male may be six feet tall and weigh 400 pounds or more; his enormous arms can span eight feet.”

— Dian Fossey

“Before he died in 2013, the great sociologist Robert Bellah said that his view of everything he'd studied across his life was tilted on its axis by this late recognition: when mammals began to bring forth offspring from the center of their bodies, spiritual life became possible. With apes and far more with humans, the period of necessary parental care-care in order for the offspring to survive-became longer and longer. The long helplessness of the child generated a sphere of softening, experimentation, and creativity in self-understanding and shared life. This is the biological groundwork for the axial move-stepping out of fear and into care beyond one's self. The religions apprehended this long ago and wove it into language; compassion in both Hebrew and Arabic derives from the word for womb.”

— Krista Tippett

“We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more-there is no greater relationship. Long before Darwin, a priest lucid in his madness encountered four chimpanzees on a forlorn island in Africa and hit upon a great truth: We are risen apes, not fallen angels.”

— Yann Martel

“Our species may yet end its strange eventful history as just the last, the cleverest of the great apes. The great ape that was clever-but not clever enough. It could escape from most things but not from its own mental confusion.”

— H.G. Wells

“Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities.”

— Frans De Waal

“(At least one theory suggests that while great apes and adult
Humans are sentient, young Human children are not. I admit to a
certain fondness for this conclusion; if childen aren't nonsentient,
they're certainly psychopathic)”

— Peter Watts

“My sister has appendages connected to her ankles. They feature toes and arches, but I cannot call them feet. In color they resemble the leathery paws of great apes, but in texture they are closer to hooves. In order to maintain her balance, she'll periodically clear the bottoms of debris-a bottle cap, bits of broken glass, a chicken bone-but within moments she'll have stepped on something else and begun the process all over again. It's what happens when you sell both your broom and your vacuum cleaner.”

— David Sedaris

“But there is every reason to think that the bulging cortex which would later measure stars and ice ages was still a dim, impoverished region in a skull box whose capacity was no greater than that of great apes.”

— Loren Eiseley

“It was their individuality combined with the shyness of their behavior that remained the most captivating impression of this first encounter with the greatest of the great apes.”

— Dian Fossey

“None of the three great apes is considered ancestral to modern man, Homo sapiens, but they remain the only other type of extant primate with which human beings share such close physical characteristics. From them we may learn much concerning the behavior of our earliest primate prototypes, because behavior, unlike bones, teeth, or tools, does not fossilize.”

— Dian Fossey

“Paleontologists do not have to search for famous "missing link" from which humans supposedly came, and current great apes. This link is simply the socialist - because he has both monkey genes.”

— Janusz Korwin-Mikke

“These magnificent species of Africa - elephants, rhino, lions, leopards, cheetah, the great apes (Africa has four of the world's five great apes) - this is a treasure for all humanity, and they are not for sale. They are not for trade. They need to be valued and preserved by humanity. We all need a global commitment to that.”

— Patrick Bergin

“Bonobos are unique among great apes because they are not dominated by males.”

— Claudine Andre

“All gods have good points, just as have all priests. Personally, I attach much importance to Hanuman , and am kind to his people the great gray apes of the hills. One never knows when one may want a friend.”

— Rudyard Kipling

“I looked for great men, but all I found were the apes of their ideals.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“The disappointed one speaks. I searched for great human beings; I always found only the apes of their ideals.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“The great thing about this jungle of ours is that anyone of you could grow up to be Lord of the apes.”

— Gary Larson

“Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans are thinking, self-aware beings, capable of planning ahead, who form lasting social bonds with others and have a rich social and emotional life. The great apes are therefore an ideal case for showing the arbitrariness of the species boundary. If we think that all human beings, irrespective of age or mental capacity, have some basic rights, how can we deny that the great apes, who surpass some humans in their capacities, also have these rights?”

— Peter Singer