"Primates arouse a certain nervousness because they show us ourselves in a brutally honest light, reminding us,.....that we are mere 'naked apes."

"If people laugh at primates at the zoo, they do so, I suspect, precisely because they're unsettled by the mirror held up to them."

"it's hard to fool an ape. One reason for that is the absence of distraction by the spoken word. We attach such importance to verbal communication that we lose track of what our bodies say about us."

"The reality is that we are bodies born from other bodies, bodies feeding other bodies, bodies having sex with other bodies, bodies seeking a shoulder to lean or cry on, bodies traveling long distances to be close to other bodies, and so on. Would life be worth living without these connections and the emotions they arouse? How happy would we be, especially given that happiness, too, is an emotion?"

"Our societies probably work best if they mimic as closely as possible the small-scale communities of our ancestors. We certainly did not evolve to live in cities with millions of people where we bump into strangers everyone we go, are threatened by them in dark streets, sit next to them in the bus, and give them the finger in traffic jams."