Frans de Waal > Quotes

“The enemy of science is not religion... . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.”
― Frans de Waal

“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?”
― Frans de Waal

“Perhaps it's just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior.”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the ‘God is dead’ phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a religious ritual) is never to be confused with its acquired purpose: ‘Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.’

This is a liberating thought, which teaches us to never hold the history of something against its possible applications. Even if computers started out as calculators, that doesn’t prevent us from playing games on them. (47) (quoting Nietzsche, the Genealogy of Morals)”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later—or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!”
― Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are

“So, don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also to our closest relatives, the primates.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like.”
― Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are

“humans are a strange lot. We have the power to analyze and explore the world around us, yet panic as soon as the evidence threatens to violate our expectations”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we creative enough to investigate it? Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.”
― Frans de Waal

“The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals. When we are considering species like the apes, which are aptly known as “anthropoids” (humanlike), however, anthropomorphism is in fact a logical choice. Dubbing an ape’s kiss “mouth-to-mouth contact” so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would be like assigning Earth’s gravity a different name than the moon’s, just because we think Earth is special.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Those who exclaim that “animals are not people” tend to forget that, while true, it is equally true that people are animals. To minimize the complexity of animal behavior without doing the same for human behavior erects an artificial barrier.”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“Robin Hood had it right.Humanity's deepest wish is to spread the wealth.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“When we see a disciplined society, there is often a social hierarchy behind it. This hierarchy, which determines who can eat or mate first, is ultimately rooted in violence.”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“If you wish to expel religion from our European civilization you can only do it through another system of doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity, and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defense.”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“Having escaped the Dark Ages in which animals were mere stimulus-response machines, we are free to contemplate their mental lives. It is a great leap forward, the one that Griffin fought for. But now that animal cognition is an increasingly popular topic, we are still facing the mindset that animal cognition can be only a poor substitute of what we humans have. It can’t be truly deep and amazing. Toward the end of a long career, many a scholar cannot resist shining a light on human talents by listing all the things we are capable of and animals not. From the human perspective, these conjectures may make a satisfactory read, but for anyone interested, as I am, in the full spectrum of cognitions on our planet, they come across as a colossal waste of time. What a bizarre animal we are that the only question we can ask in relation to our place in nature is “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“It is said that man is wolf to man. I find this very unfair to wolves.”
― Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved

“If faith makes people buy an entire package of myths and values without asking too many questions, scientists are only slightly better.”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognitions of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“There are so many ways to account for negative outcomes that it is safer to doubt one’s methods before doubting one’s subjects.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“From an evolutionary perspective, nothing could be worse for a male than to eliminate his own progeny. It’s assumed, therefore, that nature has provided males with a rule of thumb to attack only infants of mothers with whom they have had no recent sex. This may seem foolproof for the males, but it opens the door for a brilliant female counterstrategy. By accepting the advances of many males, a female can buffer herself against infanticide because none of her mates can discard the possibility that her infant is his. In other words, it pays to sleep around.”
― Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are

“Having spent all my life among academics, I can tell you that hearing how wrong they area is about as high on their priority list as finding a cockroach in their coffee. The typical scientist has made an interesting discovery early on in his or her career, followed by a lifetime of making sure that everyone else admires his or her contribution and that no one questions it. There is no poorer company than an aging scientist who has failed to achieve these objectives.”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“Rather than reflecting an immutable human nature, morals are closely tied to the way we organize ourselves.”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“In other words, what is salient to us—such as our own facial features—may not be salient to other species.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Werner Heisenberg put it, “what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Heisenberg, a German physicist, made this observation regarding quantum mechanics, but it holds equally true for explorations of the animal”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“But those stories inspire observations and experiments that do help us sort out what’s going on. The science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly once said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“There are many ways to process, organize, and spread information, and it is only recently that science has become open-minded enough to treat all these different methods with wonder and amazement rather than dismissal and denial. So,”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Emotions help us navigate a complex world that we don’t fully comprehend. They are our body’s way of ensuring that we do what is best for us.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“The common argument that men are naturally polygamous and women naturally monogamous is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.”
― Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are

“Ultimately these battles are about females, which means that the fundamental difference between our two closest relatives is that one resolves sexual issues with power, while the other resolves power issues with sex.”
― Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are