216 Quotes by Frans de Waal

"The original form is the contagion of fear and alarm. You’re in a flock of birds. One bird suddenly takes off. You have no time to wait and see what’s going on. You take off, too. Otherwise, you’re lunch."

"In other words, both macaques and rats volunteer for tests only when they feel confident, suggesting that they know their own knowledge."

"If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee’s eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?"

"The primate laugh is given in playful contexts, and as such has a strong similarity to the human laugh."

"We are so logic-driven that we can’t stand the absence of it."

"We are territorial, power-hungry and even more brutal than chimpanzees."

"Competitiveness is just as much a part of our nature as empathy. The ideal, in my view, is a democratic system with a social market economy, because it takes both tendencies into account."

"Bonobo studies started in the ’70s and came to fruition in the ’80s. Then in the ’90s, all of a sudden, boom, they ended because of the warfare in the Congo. It was really bad for the bonobo and ironic that people with their warfare were preventing us from studying the hippies of the primate world."

"It wasn’t God who introduced us to morality; rather, it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to."

"Human reflection is chronically overrated, though, and we now suspect that our own reaction to food poisoning is in fact similar to that of rats. Garcia’s findings forced comparative psychology to admit that evolution pushes cognition around, adapting it to the organism’s needs."