Apes Quotes - Page 13

• Then, of course, through the umbilical link we all tumble backwards down the spiralling DNA staircase to one common ancestor in Africa, and before that some bunch of curious monkeys. Down and down we go unto the sea, unto the dust, the single cellular dust. What impulse drove one cell to become two? What yearning pulled the fish on to the land? What caused apes to walk upright? Some invisible magnetic pull. Is there a difference between attraction and intention? Where is evolution taking us?

  Russell Brand

  Dna, Cells, Dust

  Russell Brand (2014). “Revolution”, p.66, Ballantine Books

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• Man is man because he chanced to develop intelligence instead of instinct; otherwise he would to this day have remained among the anthropoid apes. He has turned away from nature, become unnatural, as it were, disliked the earth upon which he found himself, and changed the face of it somewhat to his liking.

  Jack London

  Men, Earth, Faces

  Jack London (2014). “The Kempton-Wase Letters”, p.63, Simon and Schuster

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• Almost all theological thought is anthropocentric and I just cannot buy into the anthropocentric ideology. Basically we're a bunch of conceited apes.

  Paul Watson

  Conceited, Religion, Bunch

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• I call the notion that we are nothing but killer apes the Beethoven fallacy. Beethoven was disorganized and messy, and yet his music is the epitome of order.

  Frans de Waal

  Order, Killers, Epitome

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• Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies? That meddling ape imitation, as soon as we come to years of indiscretion, (so let me speak,) snatches the pen, and blots out nature's mark of separation, cancels her kind intention, destroys all mental individuality. The lettered world no longer consists of singulars: it is a medley, a mass; and a hundred books, at bottom, are but one.

  Edward Young

  Book, Years, Individuality

  Edward Young, John Doran (1854). “The complete works, poetry and prose, of ... Edward Young. Revised [by J. Nichols]. To which is prefixed, a life of the author, by J. Doran”, p.561

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• I watched Picasso visit the Planet of the Apes, as the masters rot on walls and the angels eat the grapes.

  Adam Ant

  Wall, Angel, Masters

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• Habit, if wisely and skillfully formed, becomes truly a second nature; but unskillfully and unmethodically depicted, it will be as it were an ape of nature, which imitates nothing to the life, but only clumsily and awkwardly

  Francis Bacon

  Habit, Ifs

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• Even if this is the end of humankind, we dare not take away the chances some other life-form might have to succeed where we failed. If we retaliate, there will not be a dog, a deer, an ape, a bird or fish or lizard to carry the evolutionary torch. In the name of justice, if we must condemn and destroy ourselves, let us not condemn all life along with us! We are heavy enough with sins. If we must destroy, let us stop with destroying ourselves!

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Dog, Names, Justice

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• Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly .

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Butterfly, Dark, Kissing

  Vladimir Nabokov (2012). “Selected Poems”, p.125, Knopf

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• Some ... sexist evil probably predates religion and can be ascribed to our biology, but there is no question that religion promulgates and renders sacrosanct attitudes toward women that would be unseemly in a brachiating ape.

  Sam Harris

  Attitude, Evil, Atheism

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• It's clearly possible for a something to acquire higher intelligence than its ancestors: we evolved to be smarter than our ape-like ancestors, and Einstein was smarter than his parents.

  Stephen Hawking

  Parent, Ancestor, Higher

  Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. October 8, 2015.

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• A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Men, Reform, Graves

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.1216, Delphi Classics

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• Civilisation is only a pretense. In crisis we have become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and instead becoming the hairy primate at the mouth of the cave, screeching at the enemy wishing it would go away, fingering the heavy stone we will use the moment it comes close enough

  Orson Scott Card

  Enemy, Going Away, Wish

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• The idea that war should be conducted within a moral framework may seem like a quaint medieval practice, but as speech separates humans from the apes, so morality separates civilisation from the barbarians.

  Eric Corley

  War, Practice, Ideas

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• Sure, I'd play an ape if they asked me. Maurice Evans did.

  Joan Crawford

  Play, Ifs

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Humans became easy prey when they moved from the forest to the savanna, which deprived them of the option of climbing trees to flee predators. This shift made it necessary for the men to actively protect the women and their babies. Only as a result of this protection were women able to give birth in shorter intervals, perhaps once every two or three years. This meant that they could produce offspring about twice as frequently as apes. I would be willing to bet that this rapid reproduction is one of the reasons why we dominate the world today, and not the apes.

  Frans de Waal

  Baby, Men, Climbing

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• At once I feel that comedy is this amazing sort of transcendent thing, and I'm also open to the fact that maybe it's just an evolutionary hiccup, something that upright apes do in their free time.

  Bo Burnham

  Hiccups, Facts, Comedy

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• In an address before the "Academia," which had been organized to combat "science falsely so called," Cardinal Manning declared his abhorrence of the new view of Nature, and described it as "a brutal philosophy to wit, there is no God, and the ape is our Adam." ...These attacks from such eminent sources set the clerical fashion for several years.

  Andrew Dickson White

  Fashion, Philosophy, Views

  Andrew Dickson White (2012). “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom: From Creation to the Victory of Scientific and Literary Methods”, p.71, Transaction Publishers

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• Much like the French (or like ourselves, their apes),Who with strange habit do disguise their shapes;Who loving novels, full of affectation,Receive the manners of each other nation.

  Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas

  Shapes, Strange, Habit

  Josuah Sylvester, Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (seigneur), Gui Du Faur de Pibrac, Odet de La Noue (seigneur de Téligny), Henry Smith (1967). “The Complete Works of Joshuah Sylvester: For the First Time Collected and Edited”

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• We can no longer communicate with the apes by direct language, nor can we understand, without special study, their modes of communication which we have long since replaced by more elaborate forms. But it is at least presumable that they could still detect in our speech, at least when it is public and elaborate, the underlying tone values with which it began. Thus if we could take a gibbon ape to a college public lecture, he would not understand it, but he would "get a good deal of it." This is all the students get anyway.

  Stephen Leacock

  Communication, College, Long

  Stephen Leacock, Gerald Lynch (2002). “Leacock on Life”, p.60, University of Toronto Press

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• Most people recognize me from The Shawshank Redemption, but there is this subculture of people who have collected all 13 episodes of Greg The Bunny. And I'm still close to a number of the creative people, Dan Milano particularly, who created Warren The Ape and Greg The Bunny and all of those characters.

  Bob Gunton

  Character, Numbers, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Happy Birthday to Fay Wray, a wonderful actress. She was, of course, in the movie 'King Kong' and would have been 99-years-old today. She was famous because of her love interest with a giant ape, and, wait a minute, that's Maria Shriver.

  David Letterman

  Kings, Years, Waiting

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• Break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.

  Robert E. Howard

  Civilization, Skins, Roaring

  Letter to Harold Preece, c. January or February 1928.

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• The fact that the apes exist and that we can study them is extremely important and makes us reflect on ourselves and our human nature. In that sense alone, you need to protect the apes.

  Frans de Waal

  Important, Needs, Facts

  "The Bonobo in All of Us". Interview with Sue Western, www.pbs.org. January 1, 2007.

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• Contrary to general belief, humans imitate apes more than the reverse. The sight of monkeys or apes induces an irresistible urge in people to jump up and down, exaggeratedly scratch themselves and holler in a way that must make the primates wonder how this otherwise so intelligent species has come to depend on such inferior means of communication.

  Frans de Waal

  Communication, Mean, Intelligent

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