Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

Human folk are as a matter of fact eager to find intelligence in animals.

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

With land-roaming animals, I've just read so much about the sophistication of their emotional lives and their intelligence and the way they process information that betrays a greater intelligence.

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

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

There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness; we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?

Scientists have shown that pigs are capable of playing simple video games, learning from each other, and even learning names.

Early experiences convinced me that animals can and do have quite distinct personalities.

I never thought I could learn much from a dog or cat. They sleep when we sleep. They eat when we eat. I'm into observing animals being as wild as they can be in a captive environment.

Pigs are smarter than dogs, and both are smarter than Congress.

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment.

The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.

I have come to know Bugs so well that I no longer have to think about what he is doing in any situation.

One would wonder to hear skeptical men disputing for the reason of animals, and telling us it is only our pride and prejudices that will not allow them the use of that faculty. Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation, or the continuance of his species. Animals in their generation are wiser than the sons of men; but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass. Take a brute out of his instinct, and you find him wholly deprived of understanding.

There are a lot of smart creatures out there. Dolphins, elephants, and whales are smart. And there are some really smart birds. I know some really intelligent fish. But they cannot know what humans know and are incapable of inflicting as much damage.

Animals are good to think with.

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

I was always interested in animals, but when I was little, animal behavior was still a new science. It was available to become a veterinarian, it was available to study biology, but not specifically animal behavior. In the '60s, Jane Goodall was the founder of this new science.

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.

Animals in general have sparked a weird depression in me, because as much as I tried, I couldn't layer a personality over them. You know what I mean? I would stare at the cows, and I would sing to the cows, and they would always just look at me blankly.

Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.

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

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.

Closeness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated.