Top 71 Primates Quotes & Sayings

He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material.

We remain of the view that in many areas of research we are still reliant on primates to achieve our goals for improving human health

I think we give human beings too much credit. We're primates, you know.

One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)

The townspeople are morons, yokels, peasants and genus homo boobiensis...surrounded by gaping primates from the upland vallies.

Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education.

The evolutionary struggle for survival is really a self-serving series of blows and stabs, and yet it can lead to extremely social animals like dolphins, wolves or, for that matter, primates.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

Primates are the only animals on the face of the earth that can taste sweet and see color. We were designed by nature to see, grasp, eat, and enjoy the flavor of colorful, sweet fruits.

I think we were colonized by aliens 250,000 years ago, and they genetically altered our DNA to be primates into homo erectus and humans. I'm very interested in how we evolved so suddenly, which obviously ties in with the alien thing.

In humans, the family prevents infanticide. Next to language, the core family, consisting of a mother, a father and children, is the greatest difference between us and other primates.

Primates are really well designed to see who is not keeping up their end of the deal.

We fill the woods with invasive primates camouflaged to look like piles of leaves who sneak around, sprinkling estrus doe urine and manipulating gadgets that sound like antlers clashing.

I'm always keen to use my body in my work, so I'm looking forward to the motion capture for Smaug. Both Gollum and King Kong were primates, whereas I'm playing a serpent, so it'll be interesting - I'll have to tie my legs together, possibly, or else they'll be kind of splayed out to the side as a reptile's should be.

Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material.

It is a common trait of primates to become submissive and even worshipful toward one who has the power to kill them.

Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out.

And I tell you one thing, if the primates that we came from, had know that someday politicians would come out of the gene pool, they would have stayed up in the trees and written evolution off as a bad idea.

Primate books are good for us. They remind us that we're primates, too. And the embarrassing primate books are best. Macachiavellian Intelligence is an excellently embarrassing primate book, and just the thing to make us blush and shuffle our feet.

Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves.

I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

We do some experiments in humans, some in mice, and there are some questions that can only be answered in nonhuman primates. It's true that you can't immediately say that those experiments will translate into human health, but nevertheless, it is obvious that having an understanding of human memory is going to be important for human health.

Trees are essentially growing chairs. There are lots of primates that sit and sleep in them.

The only option is politeness-remember always that you are dealing with other primates.

The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.

Primates stand at a turning point in the course of evolution. Primates are to the biologist what viruses are to the biochemist. They can be analysed and partly understood according to the rules of a simpler discipline, but they also present another level of complexity: viruses are living chemicals, and primates are animals who love and hate and think.

This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about.

Primates will continue to play social games without the least insight into what is killing them.

Primates need good nutrition, to begin with. Not only fruits and plants, but insects as well.

I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others.

We are by far the most contradictory of all primates. An animal with this much internal conflict has never lived on this earth.

It's the bond between mother and child, which is really for us and for chimps and other primates, the root of all the expressions of social behavior.

Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show truly staggering ability to 'ignore' certain kinds of information - that which does not 'fit' their imprinted/ conditioned reality-tunnel

Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.

Studies of reconciliation in primates have demonstrated that if the relationship value increases between two parties they are more willing to make peace.

Contrary to general belief, humans imitate apes more than the reverse. The sight of monkeys or apes induces an irresistible urge in people to jump up and down, exaggeratedly scratch themselves and holler in a way that must make the primates wonder how this otherwise so intelligent species has come to depend on such inferior means of communication.

Marriage probably originated as a straightforward food-for-sex deal among foraging primates. Compatibility was not a big issue, nor, of course, was there any tension over who would control the remote.

Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.

To neglect the common ground with other primates, and to deny the evolutionary roots of human morality, would be like arriving at the top of a tower to declare that the rest of the building is irrelevant, that the precious concept of "tower" ought to be reserved for the summit.

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

The black and white lemur, the one that relaxes on that branch, they actually have day care, like kindergartens; where all the mothers come together and they put all the babies into this one nest and they let dad watch it while they go out and have food and have a good time and then they come back in a few hours. We've never seen that in other primates.

Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.

I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don't have what we call intelligence, and they're surviving just fine.

If you're a gazelle, you don't have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression.

We belong to that order of mammals, the primates, distinguished by its propensity for repeated single litters, intense parental care, long life-spans, late sexual maturity, and a complex and extensive social existence... Our protracted biological and psychological helplessness, which extends well into the third year of life, intensifies the bond between infant and parents, making possible a sense of generational continuity. In contrast to other primates these bonds are not obliterated after sexual maturity.

There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors.

Primates feel pure, flat immobility as boredom. But dogs feel it as peace.

I am a vegetarian because I realized that even little chickens suffer pain and fear, experience a range of feelings and emotions, and are as intelligent as mammals, including dogs, cats, and even some primates.

The chimpanzee study was - well, it's still going on, and I think it's taught us perhaps more than anything else to be a little humble; that we are, indeed, unique primates, we humans, but we're simply not as different from the rest of the animal kingdom as we used to think.

Primates are very territorial. It is in their nature to protect their food resources as well as their females and young.

Non-human primates spend hours a day grooming each other. And with humans, touching is also important. It's a way to form bonds and connect in modern society. But you can also speed up the use of conscious purposes once you're aware of that, and it can be manipulated.

The stress response is incredibly ancient evolutionarily. Fish, birds and reptiles secrete the same stress hormones we do, yet their metabolism doesn't get messed up the way it does in people and other primates.

Primates are hardwired for us/them dichotomies. Our brains detect them in less than 100 milliseconds.

Attention is the way social primates measure status. It is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins.

I’ve never met anyone who had a monkey for a friend before. (Maggie) I don’t know. I think those two guys you were with would qualify as primates, but then, that’s an insult to the primate and I don’t want Marvin to get pissed at me. He has higher sensibilities, you know? (Wren)

If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, then children are somewhat closer to our roots as primates in the arboreal forest. Humans appear to be the only primates that I know of that are afraid of heights. All other primates, when they're scared, they run up a tree, where they feel safe.

Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.

The quantity and quality of consciousness, one may say, have always been growing throughout geological times. In this respect man, in whom nervous organisation and therefore psychological powers have attained an undisputed maximum, may be considered, scientifically, as a natural centre of evolution of the primates.

When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.

I actually taught perceptual psychology at N.Y.U. when I was younger. I was interested in the aesthetic impulse in lower primates. But what really interested me in Dian Fossey was that she made a difference - she saved the gorillas.