Primates Inc Quotes & Sayings

But that's not even the problem. What his sentence (Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach teach the teachers and those who can't teach the teachers go into politics.) means isn't that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who've been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. — Muriel Barbery

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. — Frans De Waal

When they first developed the organs of exploration, there was no there there. So they built timid, stupid machines and hurled them into the airless void to report back. Then they built idiot phone exchanges and put them in orbit to fill the void with chatter. Obsessed with biological replicators, they ignored the most interesting corners of the solar system and focused on dull, arid Mars. They periodically scurried up above the atmosphere and hunkered down in tunnels on Luna or ventured on expedition to domes on Mars, and they died in significant numbers before the end, simply because canned primates couldn't thrive in vacuum or survive solar flares. — Charles Stross

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 — Robert Anton Wilson

Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This gawky wormbent tabernacle. — Cormac McCarthy

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 — Colin Blakemore

According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future. — Margaret Atwood

The belief that the animals exist because God created them - and that he created them so we can better meet our needs - is contrary to our scientific understanding of evolution and, of course, to the fossil record, which shows the existence of non-human primates and other animals millions of years before there were any human beings at all. — Peter Singer

The very fact we use the term "cold-blooded" as a synonym for "heartless" should tell you something about the innate bias we primates hold against reptiles. Do not judge other species by your own social norms. — Becky Chambers

Though bonobos tend to be a lot hairier than us - and they don't build houses or churches or Pentagons like we do - these primates look and act remarkably human. They often even go beyond the merely "human," and enter the realm of the truly "humane. — Susan Block

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

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. — Benedict Cumberbatch

In the same way that humans have a "handy" intelligence, which we share with other primates, elephants may have a "trunky" one. There — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from "I think I understand" to "I understand," we need to see the sights and feel the motions. — Steven Pinker

Other primates, of course, have none of these problems, but even they strive for a certain kind of society. In their behavior, we recognize the same values we pursue ourselves. For example, female chimpanzees have been seen to drag reluctant males toward each other to make up after a fight, while removing weapons from their hands. Moreover, high-ranking males regularly act as impartial arbiters to settle disputes in the community. I take these hints of community concern as a sign that the building blocks of morality are older than humanity, and that we don't need God to explain how we got to where we are today. On — Frans De Waal

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

To assert that the universe has a purpose implies the universe has intent. And intent implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life's neurological pinnacle? Are answers to these questions even possible without expressing a profound bias of human sentiment? Of course humans were not around to ask these questions for 99.9999% of cosmic history. So if the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Malcolm Gladwell

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) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

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. — Angela Carter

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. — Arne Glimcher

When we are bad, we are worse than any primate that I know. And when we are good, we are actually better and more altruistic than any primate that I know. — Frans De Waal

Part of the reason for the evolutionary success of primates, human or otherwise, is that we are a pretty smart collection of animals. What's more, our thumbs work in particularly fancy and advantageous ways, and we're more flexible about food than most. But our primate essence is more than just abstract reasoning, dexterous thumbs, and omnivorous diets. Another key to our success must have something to do with this voluntary transfer process, this primate legacy of feeling an itch around adolescence. — Robert M. Sapolsky

What is a potto?"
"It is a little furry creature that sleeps all day with its head between its legs and then walks about very, very slowly all night, high in the trees, slowly eating leaves and creeping up on birds as they roost and eating them too. — Patrick O'Brian

A crucial capability of System 2 is the adoption of "task sets": it can program memory to obey an instruction that overrides habitual responses. Consider the following: Count all occurrences of the letter f in this page. This is not a task you have ever performed before and it will not come naturally to you, but your System 2 can take it on. It will be effortful to set yourself up for this exercise, and effortful to carry it out, though you will surely improve with practice. Psychologists speak of "executive control" to describe the adoption and termination of task sets, and neuroscientists have identified the main regions of the brain that serve the executive function. One of these regions is involved whenever a conflict must be resolved. Another is the prefrontal area of the brain, a region that is substantially more developed in humans than in other primates, and is involved in operations that we associate with intelligence. — Daniel Kahneman

Getting even was the basis of many primate semantic confusions, such as"expropriating the expropriators," "an absolute crime demands an absolute penalty," "they did it to me so I can do it to them," and, in general, the emotional mathematics of "one plus one equals zero" (1 + 1 = 0).

The primates were so dumb they didn't realize that one plus one equals two (1 + 1 = 2) and one murder plus one murder equals two murders, one crime plus one crime equals two crimes, etc. — Robert Anton Wilson

In Unistat, due to the strong encouragement of individualistic third-and fourth-circuit (semantic-moral) functions, slavery had grown so repugnant that it was formally "abolished" within a century after the formation of the pack constitution; it lingered on through inertia in the form of "wage slavery," which required that all primates not born into the sixty families that "owned" almost everything would have to "work" for those families or their corporations in order to get the tickets (called "money") which were necessary for survival. — Robert Anton Wilson

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. — Louise J. Kaplan

- Chickens have a twenty-minute memory. We primates cope through booze and denial. Dial up more of that denial part, you'll last longer. — Ellen Datlow