Charles Darwin Quotes

Perhaps measuring animal intelligence by comparing it to human intelligence isn't the best litmus test.

One thing bothered me as a student. In the 1960s, human behavior was totally off limits for the biologist. There was animal behavior, then there was a long time nothing, after which came human behavior as a totally separate category best left to a different group of scientists.

Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language - sign language - and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.

There has been so much underestimating of animal cognition that to perhaps overestimate it, as I probably do, is probably a healthy reaction.

The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology.

If a cat does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties.

One of the things we found out as we filmed with people who dealt with chimps, and with all animals, and it's really incredible, is their levels of intelligence that we don't recognize right away.

If you spend enough time around something like baboons, you start to look at humans differently.

There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.

Chimps are far too much human to be my favorite animal.

There isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. All the time, we find animals doing things that, in our arrogance, we thought were just human.

I don't need to kill goats to say things. I CAN talk.

Zoologists seem to consider the cerebration of cats and dogs about 50-50 -- but my respect always goes to the cool, sure, impersonal, delicately poised feline who minds his business and never slobbers.

What is denominated discretion in man we call cunning in brutes.

Anytime you work with animals, you begin to see more humanity in them.

Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged?

Chimpanzees, more than any other living creature, have helped us to understand that there is no sharp line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. It's a very blurry line, and it's getting more blurry all the time.

Metaphysical problems about "mind" versus "matter" arise only from epistemological confusions.

A lifelong intimacy with animals has got me out of the common notion that they are automata with a slight infusion of intelligence in their composition. The mind in beast and bird, as in man, is the main thing.

I’m adding ‘canine’ to my searches,” I said. “And ‘instinct.’” “Whatever. I’m adding ‘lunatic.

Though our conduct seems so very different from that of the higher animals, the primary instincts are much alike in them and in us.

My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They're very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness.

We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.

Sheep are not considered the most intelligent animals but British scientist say humans may have underestimated the woolly creatures. In fact, the British scientific community is even suggesting that the animals might even be "Irish-smart.".