Malcolm de Chazal Quotes

I am always incorrigibly interested in the behaviour of the 'human animal', and look forward to perusing divers effusions of your lively pen.

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.

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

People are animals, man.

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

To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.

Animals can learn, but it is not by learning that they become dogs, cats, or horses. Only man has to learn to become what he is supposed to be.

If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.

Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.

The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.

The human is the only guilty animal.

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.

The animal needing something knows how much it needs, the man does not.

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

Animals are good to think with.

We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.

Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.

A little pure wildness is the one great present want, both of men and sheep.

Well has it been said that man is the only animal that naturally looks upwards; every other animal naturally looks down.

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.

The animals to whom nature has given the faculty we call cunning know always when to use it, and use it wisely; but when man descends to cunning he blunders and betrays.

Man is no man, but a wolf

Man perfected by society is the best of all animals; he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law and without justice. If he finds himself an individual who cannot live in society, or who pretends he has need of only his own resources do not consider him as a member of humanity; he is a savage beast or a god.

We talked about how easy it was to make the mistake of anthropomorphizing animals, and projecting our own feelings and perceptions on to them, where they were inappropriate and didn't fit. We simply had no idea what it was like being an extremely large lizard, and neither for that matter did the lizard, because it was not self-conscious about being an extremely large lizard, it just got on with the business of being one. To react with revulsion to its behavior was to make the mistake of applying criteria that are only appropriate to the business of being human.