Top 89 Chimpanzees Quotes & Sayings

I'm always pushing for human responsibility. Given that chimpanzees and many other animals are sentient and sapient, then we should treat them with respect.

One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.

Chimpanzees can be quite political.

I have shown that Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees.

Male chimpanzees have an extraordinarily strong drive for dominance. They're constantly jockeying for position.

People say maybe we have a soul and chimpanzees don't. I feel that it's quite possible that if we have souls, chimpanzees have souls as well.

There are five kinds of great apes: bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, and the one which people always think of last: Humans!

Louis [Leakey] was anxious to initiate a scientific study of these chimpanzees. It would be difficult, he emphasized, for nothing was known; there were no guidelines for such a field study; and the habitat was remote and rugged. Dangerous wild animals would be living there, and chimpanzees themselves were considered at least four times stronger than humans. I remember wondering what kind of scientist he would find for such a herculean task.

We now know that the structure of the DNA in humans and chimpanzees differs by only just over one percent. You could even have a blood transfusion from a chimp, provided you have the same blood group.

I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.

Wild groups of chimpanzees attack their enemies like gangs. What they completely lack, precisely because of their strong territorial behavior, is a friendly relationship with their neighbors.

Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

In technological development, in production of material goods and creature comforts, we've challenged the very gods, but psychologically, emotionally, we're scarcely more than chimpanzees with bulldozers, baboons with big bombs.

Chimpanzees, typically, kiss and embrace after fights. They first make eye contact from a distance to see the mood of the others. Then they approach and kiss and embrace.

The chimpanzees taught me a lot about nonverbal communication. The big difference between them and us is that they don't have spoken language. Everything else is almost the same: Kissing, embracing, swaggering, shaking the fist.

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

When we look at chimpanzees . . . we get this extremely fine-grained view of evolution, and as a result we understand a lot more about the processes that are changing our own genome over time.

We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it.

What I was most curious about was why Armstrong, a top U.S. Navy test pilot, flying the most advanced aircraft in the world, would want to join the astronaut corps in 1962, which included chimpanzees and monkeys.

When it comes to social interaction, the chimpanzees appear to be just as intelligent as we are.

In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees.

My impression is that a sense of rhythm, which has no analog in language, is unique and that its correlation with movement is unique to human beings. Why else would children start to dance when they're two or three? Chimpanzees don't dance.

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes - the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans.

And I thought how sad it was that, for all our sophisticated intellect, for all our noble aspirations, our aggressive behavior was not just similar in many ways to that of the chimpanzees - it was even worse. Worse because human beings have the potential to rise above their baser instincts, whereas chimpanzees probably do not.

It is not only visitors to the zoo who are fascinated but uneasy in the presence of chimpanzees; the same is true of scientists. The more they learn about these great apes, the deeper our identity crisis seems to become. The resemblance between humans and chimpanzees is not only external. 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?

Chimpanzees have very strong preferences and aversions that are completely personality-linked. The people who are unsuccessful in working with chimpanzees are those who take this personally.

It was both fascinating and appalling to learn that chimpanzees were capable of hostile and territorial behavior that was not unlike certain forms of primitive human warfare.

Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.

In fact, humans have less variation genetically than chimpanzees.

The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for themselves.

It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.

The chimpanzees could tear me apart in no time. They're many times stronger than we are.

We are unique. Chimpanzees are unique. Dogs are unique. But we humans are just not as different as we used to think.

I wasn't into chimpanzees or gorillas because I kinda felt like they were the Coke and Pepsi of the primate world.

He couldn't tell the difference between one politician and another. They were all formlessly enthusiastic chimpanzees to him.

I never wanted to give up. I thought I might have to. Especially at the beginning when chimpanzees had never seen a white person before.They gave one look at me and ran away! They were scared, but eventually I got their trust.

Chimps don't have language. Humans actively instruct others about how things should be done. Chimpanzees probably pick up cultural traditions by observation.

Chimpanzees will eat a little bit of meat. But, they never eat dairy products, and no other animal would do that.

Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.

If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimp have to be before killing him constitutes murder?

Most men probably wouldn't want to live the lives of bonobos. They're constantly clinging to their mothers' apron strings. They lack the ability to make decisions about their own fates, something that we and male chimpanzees practically consider our birthright.

Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.

I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in '86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.

Chimpanzees are an evolutionary hair's-width from us.... Now imagine a species on Earth, or anywhere else, as smart compared with humans as humans are compared with chimpanzees. How much of the universe might they figure out?

We don't exactly have the opposite interests to chimpanzees. However, things are not looking up for the chimpanzees, because we control their environment. Our interests are not perfectly aligned with theirs, and it turns out it's not easy to get interests aligned.

Chimpanzees are incredibly intelligent. They can learn more than 400 signs of American Sign Language. They have memories for spatial distribution, like numbers on a TV screen, way better than ours. You come onto the emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and despair - all the things for which I was accused of being anthropomorphic when I ascribed them to chimpanzees.

Other people have talked about chimpanzees being a window into the past, which I suppose is true, in a way.

No distinction in kind rather than degree between ourselves and the chimps? No distinction? Seriously, folks? Here is a simple operational test: the chimpanzees invariably are the one behind the bars of their cages.

The chimpanzees in the zoos do it, Some courageous kangaroos do it Let's do it, let's fall in love. I'm sure giraffes on the sly do it, Even eagles as they fly do it, Let's do it, let's fall in love.

There are beautiful examples of art done by chimpanzees in human care.

But let us not forget that human love and compassion are equally deeply rooted in our primate heritage, and in this sphere too our sensibilities are of a higher order of magnitude than those of chimpanzees.

As our closest relatives, they (chimpanzees) tell us special things about what it means to be a primate and, ultimately, what it means to be a human at the DNA level.

Through my work with PETA, I have learned a great deal about chimpanzee behavior and the plight of chimpanzees imprisoned in laboratories.

Basically we are chimpanzees with about two percent more intelligence and a little less hair.

The loss of body hair is interesting to anthropologists, because it is a feature that distinguishes us from our nearest living relatives, chimpanzees. They have body hair, we don't.

When I left the zoo and I sent my chimpanzees to the sanctuary in Florida and imagined what my chimpanzees went through for 18 years, I'm ashamed of myself.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

Chimpanzees have given me so much. The long hours spent with them in the forest have enriched my life beyond measure. What I have learned from them has shaped my understanding of human behavior, of our place in nature.

Chimpanzees is hatin but I take it all in stride. Put her in a jungle with bananas on the side.

The oldest form of the Choral Dance is the circle. Even the chimpanzees dance in a circle, and people of every continent still do it.