Best 97 quotes of Frans De Waal on MyQuotes

Frans De Waal

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn't waste time with gestures but just goes ahead and attacks.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    After World War II it was decided that, in order to prevent the Germans and the French from having another war, it would be better to tie them together into one economic pact so they would invest in each other and have mutual stakes. Until now, that has worked to prevent warfare between the two.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Armies are a purely human invention. Most soldiers who go to war nowadays don't even do it because they're inherently aggressive.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    As far as the environment is concerned, I am becoming pessimistic because I do not see anybody stepping up and taking the long view approach. It seems like we're stuck in a tragedy of the commons where everyone is trying to contribute as little as possible to get out of this situation.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Bonobo studies started in the '70s and came to fruition in the '80s. Then in the '90s, all of a sudden, boom, they ended because of the warfare in the Congo. It was really bad for the bonobo and ironic that people with their warfare were preventing us from studying the hippies of the primate world.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Competitiveness is just as much a part of our nature as empathy. The ideal, in my view, is a democratic system with a social market economy, because it takes both tendencies into account.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Darwin wasn't just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes - he didn't go far enough. We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Empathy as a complex emotion is different. It requires awareness of the other person's feelings and of one's own reactions. The appropriate reaction may not be to cry when another person cries, but to reassure them, or even to leave them alone.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Empathy probably started out as a mechanism to improve maternal care. Mammalian mothers who were attentive to their young's needs were more likely to rear successful offspring.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Exclusive homosexuality is not very common in nature.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Female bonobos form a strong sisterhood. They rule through female solidarity.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Females avoid conflict. They are afraid of violence. The males, on the other hand, are less averse to strife. But once conflict breaks out, the males are much better at reconciling. In a study done in Finland, children who had quarreled were asked how much longer they intended to be angry at one another. The boys proudly said: "Oh, at least one or two days." The girls said "forever".

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than [it's] given credit for.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Humans became easy prey when they moved from the forest to the savanna, which deprived them of the option of climbing trees to flee predators. This shift made it necessary for the men to actively protect the women and their babies. Only as a result of this protection were women able to give birth in shorter intervals, perhaps once every two or three years. This meant that they could produce offspring about twice as frequently as apes. I would be willing to bet that this rapid reproduction is one of the reasons why we dominate the world today, and not the apes.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    I am personally not against keeping animals at zoos, as they serve a huge educational purpose, but treating them well and with respect seems the least we could do, and with 'we' I mean not just zoo staff, but most certainly also the public.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    I call the notion that we are nothing but killer apes the Beethoven fallacy. Beethoven was disorganized and messy, and yet his music is the epitome of order.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    I describe in 'Chimpanzee Politics' how the alpha male needs broad support to reach the top spot. He needs some close allies and he needs many group members to be on his side.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    If both parties have a stake in the other, the chances of them killing each other are going to be reduced.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    If I were God, I'd work on the reach of empathy.

  • By Anonym
    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?

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    If you are a cooperative animal you need to watch what you get. If you, or even a whole community, invest in something but then a few individuals receive a much larger return, it's not a good arrangement. If it happens consistently, it's time to look for an arrangement that is more beneficial. That's why we're so sensitive to how rewards are being divided.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    If you look at national economies today, for example, the American economy, the European economy, the Indians, the Chinese, we're all tied together. If one of them sinks, the rest are going to sink with them and if one floats, the rest are lifted up. I find that very interesting.

  • By Anonym
    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?

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    In Africa, we have the bush meat trade, which means that, on a very large scale, animals are being killed in the forests and sold in the cities as a luxury food.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    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!

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    I think we need to start thinking about grounding our moral systems in our biology.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    It is hard to get animals which normally pay little attention to each other to do things together. One can teach dolphins to jump simultaneously out of the water precisely because they show similar behavior spontaneously, but try to make two domestic cats jump together and you will fail.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    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?

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    It is well known that apes in the wild offer spontaneous assistance to each other, defending against leopards, say, or consoling distressed companions with tender embraces.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    I've argued that many of what philosophers call moral sentiments can be seen in other species. In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that's why we like them so much, even though they're large carnivores.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    I was raised Catholic. Not just a little bit Catholic, like my wife, Catherine. When she was young, many Catholics in France already barely went to church, except for the big three: baptism, marriage, and funeral. And only the middle one was by choice.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Male bonobos really don't fit the human male ideal.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

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

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Most exotic animals are not particularly interested in people, which makes it hard to provoke them. Human-rearing gets them used to and sometimes imprinted on humans, which makes them potentially dangerous.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These 'mini-brains' are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    People want to work with somebody who feels shame, who worries about the perceptions of others. Dishonesty is something we don't like in others.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Religions have a strong binding function and a cohesive element. They emphasize the primacy of the community as opposed to the individual, and they also help set one community apart from another that doesn't share their beliefs.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Robin Hood had it right.Humanity's deepest wish is to spread the wealth.

  • By Anonym
    Frans De Waal

    Socialism cannot function, because its economic reward structure is contrary to human nature.