A Quote by Frans de Waal

If you want to design a successful human society you need to know what kind of animal we are. Are we a social animal or a selfish animal? Do we respond better when we're solitary or living in a group?

Frans de Waal

Quote Topics

Animal Better Design Group Human Human Society Kind Know Living Need Respond Selfish Social Society Solitary Successful Want

Quote Author

Frans de Waal
Dutch - Scientist
Born: October 29, 1948

Man is a thinking animal, a talking animal, a toolmaking animal, a building animal, a political animal, a fantasizing animal. But, in the twilight of a civilization he is chiefly a taxpaying animal.

Hugh MacLennan

I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason - as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Karl Marx

Architecture arises out of our need to shelter the human animal in a spatial environment and to enclose the social animal in a group space. In this sense architecture serves our institutions and expresses the values of our culture.

Robert L. Geddes

The relationship between human and animal is wholly symbiotic. The person needs the animal for comfort and companionship, and the animal needs the love and caring of the human. It is a classic "win-win" situation. It sounds simple - and it is. That is why it works so well. In most cases, it will be remarkably spiritually uplifting to both human and animal.

Ken Wahl

Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.

Leon Kass

I published a thesis about animal rights when I was studying in England in 1991. Back then, I was a human rights lawyer and people condemned me for talking about animal rights when human rights are still not guaranteed. However, human rights are guaranteed in a society where animal rights are secured.

Park Won-soon

My wife and I, we started a foundation about companion animal rescue, but there's a group called Performing Animal Welfare Society just outside of Sacramento... and they offered me a job as an elephant keeper.

Tony La Russa

The theory of animal rights simply is not consistent with the theory of animal welfare... Animal rights means dramatic social changes for humans and non-humans alike; if our bourgeois values prevent us from accepting those changes, then we have no right to call ourselves advocates of animal rights.

Gary L. Francione

Not only are the philosophies of animal rights and animal welfare separated by irreconcilable differences... the enactment of animal welfare measures actually impedes the achievement of animal rights... Welfare reforms, by their very nature, can only serve to retard the pace at which animal rights goals are achieved.

Gary L. Francione

I mean, you know, you're not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn't get a lot smarter.

Warren Buffett

And people who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Or human beings will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal.

Mark Haddon

Q: If you could be an animal, what kind of animal would you be? A: You already are an animal.

Douglas Coupland

There could conceivably be circumstances in which an experiment on an animal stands to reduce suffering so much that it would be permissible to carry it out even if it involved harm to the animal... [even if] the animal were a human being.